SwiftKey’s New 3D Emojis Can Mimic Your Facial Expressions

Introduced at the iPhone X launch event in 2017,Apple’s Animojisopened the floodgates for a multitude of tech companies, hardware vendors and app creators to come up with theirown versions of animated 3D emojisthat mimic human facial expressions. Microsoft’s popular third-party keyboard app, SwiftKey, has now joined the bandwagon by introducing a similar feature as part of its latest update.

Called‘Puppets’, the new feature will allow users to choose from a number of different avatars, including a 3D panda, cat, dog, owl or dinosaur, to imitate their facial expressions. In a blog post on Thursday, Microsoft said that the feature leverages its artificial intelligence technology to mirror the head movements and facial expressions of users in real-time. Unlike other emoji products that use 3D depth sensing,Puppetsuses thousands of crowd-sourced images and videos from SwiftKey users, said the company.

According to Deepak Paramanand, a senior program manager at Microsoft,“We created Puppets, a group of cute and furry friends that people can control just by being themselves. Choose one of five animals, record a message of less than 30 seconds and share it via one of the many popular communication apps supported by Android devices”. He further said:“Puppets can instantly recognize when a user smiles or opens their mouth, for example, and make the animated animal copy it. It is so accurate that it can even copy a person when they blink”.

Puppetshas already started rolling out on Android, but there’s no word on when it will be available on iPhones and iPads.

Kishalaya Kundu

Passionate techie. Professional tech writer. Proud geek.

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