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Google’s Auto Draw – Some Real World Use

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by Robby Payne
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Between the earlier-released Quick Draw and this month’s Auto Draw, it became very clear that Google is investing some serious development resources to become better at understanding doodles, drawings, and handwriting.

As cool as those projects have been, I’ve been curious to see where Google is headed with all this data.




G Suite (Docs, specifically), of all places, is the first serious Google Product I’ve seen begin to leverage this new skill Google is acquiring in real-time as more users play with the above-mentioned experiments.

What Can It Do?

In Google Docs, you have always been able to insert special characters. Emojis and Unicode characters have been around for what seems like forever.

The ability to find them by doodling? This is the first I’m seeing of this. See for yourself below (here’s the direct link if the twitter embed isn’t loading):

I’m unsure how often I’ll use this, but things like this could make messengers like Allo stand out from the crowd. We already have the ability to auto search emojis and GIFs with Gboard, but sometimes a picture is really worth a thousand words. When our search terms may fail, a quick doodle could bring up just the image we want to share.

With more and more Chromebooks coming to market equipped with stylus support, it is going to be very interesting to see where and when Google continues to deploy this mode of search across its products.




Just as I never really thought of using a doodle to find a character in a Google Doc, I’m sure there are plenty use cases I’m not even considering at this moment that Google is already working on.

What about you? Where would you like to see doodle search (is that what we’re calling it?) implemented? Where would it help you most?

  • steven

    It stuns me… As someone who has learned a few hundred words using Kanji … That there has not been more effort to make symbol recognition a bigger deal…

  • Have you tried to program on a phone? We badly need handwriting recognition for single special characters. Full handwriting recognition is useless – computer will never distinguish ” (one symbol) from ” (two symbols).

  • Ken

    I think that’s a good guess. We may be seeing the development of language usable in small spaces.
    Right now it looks like a fun addition to email and messaging for those who enjoy such things but in actuality Google might be working toward a machine language.

    We start with hieroglyphics and end with googl-eze?

  • CajunMoses

    I use a lot of Unicode characters — mostly math symbols and Greek letters. And, over the years, I’ve assembled a lengthy cheat sheet. Not long after I started using Google Docs regularly about a year ago, I discovered that I could just draw the character and select from a list that Docs proposed. It’s definitely in the top three things that I like most about Google Docs. I no longer have any use for my cheat sheet.

  • It looks like the stylus drawing in apps like Docs is still a work in progress. I attempted the special characters drawing feature (a circle), but when my stylus moved around the bottom of the circle left to right, it prompted the swipe right ‘back’ browser action to the previous web page. I really hope stylus support comes to Google Drawings soon! As an educator, the more stylus possibilities for Chromebooks, the better! Interestingly enough, inking in OneNote Online works fine on the Samsung Chromebook Plus.