Gboard’s new AI Writing Tools are already rolling out to non-Pixel phones

When Google unveiled the Pixel 10 series last month, the company highlighted new AI features that take advantage of the phones’ hardware. One of these is Writing Tools in Gboard, which can help you proofread or rephrase your text, saving you from having to switch to other apps for grammar checks. Google delivered the Writing Tools feature to some older Pixel phones shortly after the Pixel 10’s launch, and it is now rolling out to some non-Pixel devices as well.

For privacy reasons, the Writing Tools feature runs on-device, ensuring your text is never uploaded to the cloud. This is made possible by the Gemini Nano model available on select devices. Gemini Nano is the smallest version of Google’s Gemini large language model (LLM), capable of running in memory-constrained environments like mobile devices. It originally debuted with the Pixel 8 Pro in late 2023, but at the time, it was limited to text-only input.

With the launch of the Pixel 9, Google upgraded Gemini Nano with multimodal capabilities, enabling it to process images and audio in addition to text. This upgraded model has also rolled out to select mobile devices from other manufacturers such as Samsung, OnePlus, and Xiaomi. Developers can leverage Gemini Nano in their own apps through the new ML Kit GenAI APIs that Google announced back in May.

It’s thanks to this expanded support that Gboard’s Writing Tools feature is starting to arrive on non-Pixel devices. The other day, when I spotted the new font size setting in Gboard on my OnePlus 13, I also noticed I had the Writing Tools button. Tapping it triggered a toast message asking me to wait for a download to be completed before I could use the feature. Once the download finished, I was able to use the Writing Tools feature to proofread and rephrase text as expected.

Last week, Google published a support page for the Writing Tools feature in Gboard, revealing that it’s available on the Pixel 9 and later in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. The support page doesn’t mention other devices, but the fact that it’s available on my unmodified OnePlus 13 suggests the feature won’t be limited to Pixel phones. We suspect it’ll be available on any Android device that supports the multimodal Gemini Nano model, which includes most devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 chipsets.

I don’t have the feature on my Galaxy Z Fold 7, though, so this could just be a limited rollout at the moment. Let us know in the comments if you have the Writing Tools feature in Gboard, and be sure to tell us what device you’re using!