Debuting as a Pixel 6-exclusive feature, Gboard's grammar checking started expanding to other Pixels back in February without much fanfare. Now it seems Google says it's officially expanding it widely to all Android phones. On top of that, Gboard is also getting over 2000 new Emoji Kitchen mashup combinations, with the fun formulaic stickers covering an even wider variety of expressions.

Google calls out examples like raining hotdogs, pretzel love, and new sparkly effects, with depicted examples further including a UFO beaming up a loving face and an alien with a cowboy hat. We don't know all of the 2,000 combinations, but finding them and the wackiest examples is half the fun.

Google just recently updated Gboard to include new tiger emoji mashups as a way of ringing in the lunar new year and the year of the tiger. The December 2021 Feature Drop also added more new combinations — there's almost always a new set to be found every month or two.

While the cooks in the Emoji Kitchen cook up the tastiest combinations, Gboard's grammar check feature is a little less well known, probably because it only recently debuted with the Pixel 6. The feature makes use of some pretty powerful machine learning skills, parsing your input fully on-device to respect your privacy and offering a blue underline and a prompt to correct the error.

Living down by the park or in a van down by the river?

In my experience, Gboard still can't tell the difference between "its" and "it's" reliably, but it's another way to catch errors if you don't type vary gaud.

App-decompiling leaker and researcher Jane Wong spotted the feature in development as early as January of 2021. After silently expanding to all Pixels last month, Google is now rolling it out to all Android phones everywhere.

This is just one piece of a whole chunk of announcements Google has today, from an expansion of portrait effects in Google Photos to more object types, a new screen time widget, iMessage reactions in Google Messages, and more.