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):
Looking to add something special to your @googledocs? This #TuesdayTip is a lock. pic.twitter.com/suelXhSSt3
— G Suite (@gsuite) April 25, 2017
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?