Ever wanted to send somebody a GIF mid-text conversation, but didn’t feel like browsing the Web or opening an app to find the right one? Giphy’s new keyboard can help – if you’re on iOS anyway.
Giphy Keys isn’t the first of its kind – there was a flood of GIF-sharing tools once Apple enabled third-party keyboards – but Giphy’s implementation is one of the better ones around.
The most obvious difference compared to most competitors is that you can actually use it as a regular keyboard as well. With something like Riffy’s popular GIF Keyboard app, you have to switch back to a standard keyboard if you want to, say, write an email to your boss (unless he’s cool with an email written in GIFs, of course).
Giphy Keys comes with a good-ol’ text keyboard of its own, which saves you a lot of time. On the downside, there’s no autocorrect, so some of that time saved time will probably be spent fixing typos. You can also create your own GIF’s by pressing the Magic 8-ball button, though these can take a while to load.
Caveats aside, GIPHY already provides arguably the best GIF-search service out there, so no doubt Keys will build a following. If the company can eventually provide a great standard typing experience to go along with the image search, it might just become your main keyboard.
You can download Keys from the App Store now. Here’s to hoping there’s an Android version coming along soon.
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