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

Jul. 5, 2019

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.

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