What to know
- Gboard is testing personalized suggestions informed by contact-phone data and your punctuation and capitalization habits.
- Its broader typing personalization is already public, but these more specific signals appear to expand what Gboard can learn.
- The dormant code was found in the unreleased Gboard v18.5.1.993608717-beta-arm64-v8a build, and we could not surface the feature in the app.
Gboard already learns from the way you type to provide personalized suggestions. That broader capability has been public for years, including learning typing habits and improving suggestions across apps.
Now, a teardown of the latest Gboard beta points to a more detailed personalization system. We decompiled Gboard v18.5.1.993608717-beta-arm64-v8a and diffed it against the previous build, uncovering new switches for contact-phone information, punctuation and capitalization patterns, and language-specific compound-word suffix prediction.
Contact-phone information could shape suggestions
The first new switch explicitly references contact-phone personalization. Its name indicates that Gboard is preparing to use contact or phone information as another signal for personalized typing suggestions.
This is more specific than the general personalization already associated with Gboard. The new string, seen below, points directly to a dedicated control for this source of information:
The code does not explain exactly which contact-phone details would be considered or how they would affect individual suggestions, so it does not support conclusions beyond the presence of this new personalization switch.
Gboard may learn your punctuation and capitalization patterns
A second switch names punctuation and letter case as personalization signals. That suggests Gboard is working on adapting suggestions to habits such as how a user capitalizes text or uses punctuation, rather than treating those choices as generic formatting behavior.
Code in Gboard v18.5.1.993608717-beta-arm64-v8a references the capability directly:
The string does not describe the interface or provide examples of the resulting suggestions. It does, however, show that punctuation-and-case personalization is represented as its own feature switch in this build.
Language-specific compound words get their own prediction switch
The apparent expansion also reaches word construction. A third flag references compound-word suffix prediction by language, pointing to personalized or language-aware help with completing compound words.
The flag does not name any supported languages or describe how suffixes would be selected. It only establishes that Gboard’s code now contains a language-specific switch for this form of prediction.
These dormant additions are not available to users yet. We’ll watch future Gboard builds for signs that the expanded personalization system is moving toward rollout.
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