Gboard could soon use your screenshots and chats to draft much better replies than you

Last year, when Google launched the Pixel 10, it also introduced Writing Tools in Gboard, a feature that utilizes Gemini to refine or rewrite text. It eventually rolled out to other flagship Android phones that fulfill the minimum requirement for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device model. And now, Google appears to be testing new features that go beyond just editing text.

Ahead of the I/O 2026, Google already appears to be testing additional controls for Writing Tools in Gboard. One of these upcoming features is the ability to add custom instructions on how you want Gboard to modify your text.

While Gboard currently lets you choose from predefined writing styles, such as professional, friendly, emojify, etc., you will soon be able to add custom instructions. By tinkering with the latest version of the Gboard beta app, we were able to dig up context and activate features that reveal what Google might be cooking.

For custom prompts, Gboard could get an additional input box under the output window. The instructions in the input box say, “Enter your custom prompt,” and tapping it opens the keyboard so you can type your specific instructions. Meanwhile, the text you’ve entered and the responses Gboard generates should populate in the box above it.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the feature to work at the moment, so we’re unsure of how well it follows custom instructions.

In addition to custom instructions, we spotted additional writing features Gboard could receive. Along with correcting or rewriting text for you, the new options could also help you draft messages entirely, similar to the existing “Help me write” feature in Gmail and Chrome. Similar to the correct feature, you will see an additional input box for you to describe what you want the AI to write.

Not just that, Gboard could also use additional context from your screen or screenshots from the gallery to automatically draft text. For writing using screenshots, users will be required to grant Gboard access to the screenshots folder in the media gallery. While we don’t know what the interface could look like, it might be limited to the most recent screenshot. A slightly varied version of this is already available to Pixel users through the combination of Gboard and the Pixel Screenshot app.

Screen context isn’t working at the moment either, but we’ve seen additional strings hinting that Gboard may gain the option to view your conversations to produce more refined text.

Finally, we’ve also seen cues about how Google wants these writing tools to behave. Google has laid out guidelines for Gboard’s underlying AI model (most likely Gemini Nano, or its successor) to work as an “expert writing coach and text editor.” This AI will scan the text you’ve written and offer three suggestions, also powered by AI, to fine-tune the original composition. These suggestions might appear in the form of buttons, making it easy for you to transform text simply by tapping them.

Based on what we’ve discovered, these instructions could most likely relate to adjusting the tone of the text using prompts such as “less robotic,” “make a joke,” “corporate jargon,” etc. The image below shows many more examples of what these prompts could be — though they could vary based on the text.

Finally, the underlying instruction also indicates that the processing could take place on-device rather than on the cloud. However, we could see features being limited to just text on certain devices with insufficient RAM.