After installing the app, open it and it will lead you through the steps to enable it.

You can write partial words, write two lines, or rotate your device to landscape orientation. We also support partial overlap in the input.

There are two options:

1. Go to "Settings -> Languages & input -> Google Handwriting Input Settings"
2. Alternatively, long-press the globe button to open the Google Handwriting Input Settings directly.

This delay before moving the writing can be changed in the settings to fit your preferences.

Long-press the return-button. If you use it in a text field for short messages (e.g. in Hangouts), the return-button allows you to directly switch by tapping.

In the settings, go to "Input Languages". You can turn off "Use system language" and choose any languages you like. Enabling more languages may require the download of additional data for the recognition to work.

The recognition can happen on the device (default, "cloud off" symbol) or in the cloud, i.e. on a Google server. Recognition on a Google server will usually produce more accurate results but the data needs to be sent over the network for recognition. You can decide which option is currently preferable for you.

How to switching IMEs depends on the version of Android you have and the regular keyboard you are using. Often this behavior is triggered by tapping a globe button or a long-press on the space bar. If your regular keyboard does not support this, you should have a notification that allows you to switch your input method.

Stand-alone symbols that are just a line (1/l/I) or circle (o/O/0) can be difficult to distinguish without context. You can improve recognition accuracy for numbers in two ways: You can use context (preceding numbers or context in the recognition, e.g. '123' in one input or '2015', '10:30'). You can also write the digit '0' with a diagonal stroke to distinguish from 'O' and '1' with a beginning upstroke to distinguish it from 'I' or 'l'.

The recognition needs to also allow uncommon or even non-words to be recognizable. This means that sometimes the recognition will produce seemingly strange-looking results that may not be words in the language you are using. The more clearly an input is readable, the less frequent these errors should occur.

You can explicitly enter spaces by tapping the space bar. (The space bar will show the language you are currently using in case you have enabled more than one language.) The recognizer also tries to predict spaces depending on the context using the previously entered text, which works best for commonly used words or phrases.

Long pressing on the center candidate will open a window with more candidates. This is especially useful when writing emoji to see more options.

At the moment Google Handwriting Input supports 97 languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galician, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Myanmar, Nepali, Norwegian, Nyanja, Odia, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scots Gaelic, Serbian, Shona, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somalian, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Zulu (and Emoji).

Switching from Google Handwriting Input to the normal keyboard works by long-pressing the spacebar in the handwriting keyboard. On new phones it may also work by pressing the globe-button left to the spacebar.

If you are having problems downloading languages try the following steps to see if they help. Once you have downloaded the data, all of the following shouldn't matter anymore.

• If your phone is connected to a computer, disconnect it before downloading.
• If you have a memory card make sure that it is in your phone and not full. It is used to download the languages but once the download has finished the space is freed and Google Handwriting Input uses private storage.
• If you have a memory card which has space and it still doesn't work try to remove the memory card from your phone and check if it works.

Uninstalling and re-installing Google Handwriting Input may help to solve the issue. In some cases, the installation and downloading process fails. Restarting from scratch helps resolve such problems in many cases.