The small size of smartwatches significantly limits the richness of text input support on them. It’s best done by voice as typing on the tiny screen can be a real pain. This makes the voice-to-text tech a crucial part of these wearables. Samsung ships its smartwatches with its in-house keyboard and voice engine. It does quite a decent job at voice-to-text translation and has been serving millions of Galaxy Watch series users all this while. But since the latest Galaxy Watch 4 series runs Wear OS instead of Tizen OS, users now have a better option in the form of Gboard. Google’s voice engine is more accurate and fast. So Gboard can better recognize your speech and translate it into text input faster than Samsung’s default keyboard. As 9to5Google notes, it can still take a second before Gboard starts recognizing voice input. But when it does, it’s faster and more accurate, meaning there will be lesser errors and mistakes.
Gboard’s QWERTY layout makes it more helpful
Gboard also wins over Samsung’s solution with support for a full QWERTY layout. The default Samsung keyboard only offers T9 input. It might be more small-screen-friendly but typing longer text on a T9 keyboard is painful. If you have a fairly long Wi-Fi password, which you wouldn’t want to enter over voice, you are in for some repeated taps on your tiny wearable screen. Perhaps you can’t input a Wi-Fi password over voice unless it’s a straightforward English sentence, so typing it in is the only option. Gboard’s QWERTY layout, meanwhile, is tested on many other Wear OS devices in the past and it works great. Its predictive text input makes things easier if you have longer bits of text to type and you can’t speak to type it over voice. Long story short, if you’re planning the get the Samsung Galaxy Watch or Galaxy Watch Classic, or have already got one, replacing the default keyboard with Gboard might be one of the first things you’d want to do on it. Note that Gboard doesn’t come pre-installed in the new Samsung watches. But you can download it from the Google Play Store.
