The Google Pixel Tablet is a fun yet capable tablet that doubles up as your smart home hub when docked. One of its little-known features is its support for USI 2.0 styli, allowing you to pick from any one of our favorite styus pens designed for Chromebooks and Android tablets. While basic stylus support is one thing, Google is reportedly preparing to bring a more advanced stylus function to the Pixel Tablet — handwriting recognition.

Over the last couple of months, we have heard quite a few times about Android 14’s upcoming native support for stylus input, with options to set your preferred notes app as default and choose how the stylus button is recognized by the software. Joining this list is a third feature called Write in text fields, according to Mishaal Rahman.

Turning this feature on under Android 14’s stylus settings will open Gboard’s handwriting recognition tool, which it gained only a couple of weeks ago. The popup lets you customize the writing speed and the stroke width, besides helping you try the new handwriting tool and all its supported gestures for things like text deletion, selection, adding a new line, and more.

With the feature turned on, you can simply handwrite in any text field on the Pixel Tablet, and Gboard will automatically convert it to typed text to make it machine-readable. It ensures that text input feels more natural when you’re using a stylus, keeping you from constantly switching between the on-device qwerty keyboard and the stylus. If you recall, Apple also introduced a similar feature dubbed Scribble for its iPad and Pencil pair, giving its users the flexibility to handwrite in any text field on the tablet.

Source: Mishaal Rahman

As you’d guess, none of these stylus features are publicly available for the Pixel Tablet yet and require a bit of tinkering to show up, which still doesn’t guarantee that they will work as shown. However, considering how fleshed-out their implementation looks in the screenshots, their release could be just around the corner.

Google could decide to bring them to its tablet with the stable Android 14 release or hold it off until the next Pixel Drop. Rumor has it that Google is working on its first-party stylus for the Pixel Tablet, so there is a chance these features will land alongside the Google stylus.