Last week, Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16215 update to Windows Insiders in the Fast Ring. This update has one of the biggest changes in the recent releases of Windows 10 operating system. The updates include a new UI for Start and Action Center, and improvements in several areas including Microsoft Edge, Cortana, handwriting experience with pen, keyboard, shell, my people, night light, settings, fonts, gaming, developers, ease to access and lot more. Windows team has published a blog with more details about improvements in this release.
In this article, let’s take a look at the hardware and touch screen keyboard improvements available in this release.
New Emoji panel on hardware keyboard
A new Emoji panel is added to the keyboard. To launch new Emoji panel, press Win + period (.) or Win + semicolon (;).
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- In the “People” emoji category, you can change the skin tone of the emoji by clicking the button on the top-right.
- The People emoji group loads various people emoji where you can also change the skin tone of the emoji.
- You can also navigate through the emoji panel using the following keys,
- Arrow keys – Navigate among emoji
- Tab / Shift + Tab – Switch emoji category
- Enter – Select an emoji
- Esc – Close the panel
New touch keyboard experience
Windows 10 brings you a totally redesigned new XAML based touch keyboard.
The improvements in this keyboard include the following -
- Enhanced text prediction
- Improved emoji experience
- One-handed touch keyboard
- Shape writing with the one-handed touch keyboard
- A new touch keyboard settings menu
- Dictation allows you to input text
- You can also use voice commands to perform basic editing, or to input punctuations. Some of the dictation commands are “press backspace”, “clear selection”, “press delete”, “delete that”, “delete last three words”, “stop dictating”, “end spelling”, “go after <word or phrase>”, “go to the end of paragraph”, “move back to the previous word”, “go to start of <word or phrase>”, “go to the start of paragraph”, “go down to next sentence”, “go to the end of the sentence”, “move to the start of the word”, “go to the left”, “move right”, “select <word or phrase>”, “select that”, “select next three words”, “start spelling”, “comma” (or “period”, “question mark” etc.) to input the punctuation “,” (or “.”, “?”, etc.).