Giphy launches a keyboard for iOS called Giphy Keys

With all of Giphy’s integrations with chat platforms, it was only a matter of time before the betaworks-backed GIF platform launched its own keyboard.

World, welcome Giphy Keys into the mix.

The Giphy Keys third-party keyboard launches on iOS today, and lets users send GIFs from any app they want. Even Snapchat.

Here’s how it works:

Once you’ve downloaded the Giphy Keys app and installed it as a keyboard on your phone (just like you did long ago with an Emoji keyboard), you will be able to tap the little globe icon on the bottom left of your keyboard in any app to bring up the Giphy Keys interface.

Users can choose from the Giphy Trending section, or simply type in a search to find the perfect GIF for the moment.

From there, simply tap the GIF you want to send and it will automatically be copied. Put the cursor in the chat window, press paste, and shoot it off into the world.

It’s slightly reminiscent of Giphy’s integration with Gmail, except that users must copy and paste for this to work, instead of just clicking the GIF they want.

But it goes beyond simple search.

Giphy Keys has a scrollable section for emotions/reactions with options like “SMH,” “applause” and “eye roll.” There is also a section with categories like animals and food.

Giphy Keys has built an 8ball section that lets you animate any words you send by simply typing them in to the “Echo” tap. Plus, you can click on the 8ball and Giphy Keys will let you ask any question (tagged appropriately with an 8ball emoji), which will automatically offer up an answer to that question.

In short, Giphy Keys goes far beyond any of the basic Giphy integrations with chat platforms to show what the Giphy API is truly capable of, with all the features in a single keyboard.

 

 

This should be a great bridge into iMessage. Giphy always offered the same search and copy/paste functionality with the main Giphy app, but this puts convenience and ease of use as a top priority for folks chatting on iMessage.

Plus, this should serve as a bit of a marketing tool for the API for developers who might be considering adding a Giphy integration.

The real brilliance here is that Giphy can now be a part of any communication, across any iOS app, without having to do a full integration with that platform. In fact, it’s a wonder why Giphy didn’t do this earlier, especially considering its acquisition of Nutmeg last year. Nutmeg shared a lot of the same functionality of Giphy Keys, offering a third-party keyboard for inserting GIFs into any conversation.

However, Nutmeg lacked the same expansive database that Giphy has been building out for the past several years.

Folks who want to check out Giphy Keys can do so right here.

Giphy Keys is a GIF keyboard app done right

When Apple announced iOS 8 back in June of 2014, the addition of third-party keyboards was one of the most-hyped features. But though developers have come up with some fantastically creative (and a few really useful) keyboard apps in almost two years since the launch of iOS 8, iOS keyboards as a whole have been disappointing.

Many have been gimmicky, nearly all have been slow and unfortunate iOS limitations keep them from being a true replacement to the iOS stock keyboard. And if keyboards as a whole have been disappointing, GIF keyboards have been notable only for being underwhelming.

Luckily, GIF startup Giphy is launching Giphy Keys, its own standalone keyboard app, on Tuesday, which offers one of the best experiences we've seen in a GIF keyboard app on iOS.

While many other GIF keyboard apps replace the iOS keyboard with GIF thumbnails you copy and paste into iMessage and other apps, Giphy Keys cleverly puts its search and discovery tools on top of a keyboard so you don't need to constantly switch between typing text and looking for the perfect reaction GIFs. 

It may sound like a small difference but give how clunky it still is to switch between keyboards on iOS (are you listening, Apple?) it's a refreshing move.

"There’s a ton of third-party GIF keyboards out there and we actually power a lot of them, but in terms of the UI [user interface], we noticed a lot of them are really similar in that it’s all GIFs right there under your thumb — and that’s great, but the intention is to switch in and out of your keyboard," Giphy's Director of Mobile Products Jillian Fisher tells Mashable. 

"It’s a pretty frustrating experience, especially if you have more than one [keyboard app] installed, we wanted to avoid that situation where you feel like you're trapped in that keyboard."

Instead, the app has a few different sections at the top of the keyboard you can use to find GIFs: search, which allows you to search Giphy's entire library; reactions, which surfaces popular reaction GIFs; explore, which breaks down GIFs by topic; favorites; recents; and a magic 8 ball section with some uniquely Giphy options that may be familiar to power users of Slack. 

IMAGE: GIPHY

That's because the app's 8 ball section borrows some of the hidden commands you can use with Giphy in Slack, including weather, which finds a GIF relevant to current weather conditions; text, which creates an animated GIF out of the text you type; and magic 8 ball, which will answer yes/no questions in the form of a randomly selected GIF. (I've been using the app for a few days now and can confirm the features are as fun as they sound.)

Of course, close observers shouldn't be surprised that the Giphy team would be the one to finally make a decent GIF keyboard — the startup is pretty much killing it right now — but it's still refreshing to see a third-keyboard app that is more fun than frustrating. 

Giphy Keys is iOS only for now, but Giphy says an Android app is in the pipeline, though there's no word when it might be available.