Facebook filed a new patent earlier this month which reveals that the company may be trying to make your face the new emoji.
Facebook filed a new patent earlier this month which reveals that the company may be trying to make your face the new emoji.
Using facial recognition technology, it appears Facebook wants to sort through your tagged photos to find faces that best match the emoji you meant to use. For example, if typing :) leads to the smile emoji, it may instead replace that with a photo of you smiling.
If implemented, it will likely limit the compatible emoji to a select set of emotions easily detectable by the software (standard crying or angry emoji come to mind.) It would also encourage users to upload and tag themselves in photos more often to have a better pool of emoji options.
You may be thinking about Slack while reading this as it already offers a similar custom emoji feature. It wouldn’t be the first time Facebook followed Slack’s footsteps in terms of emoji-related features: its Reactions feature came months after Slack introduced its own version.
Facebook’s intended implementation of custom emoji would be more automated, however. Note that Reactions arrived to Facebook nearly two years after its patent was granted, so you have time to upload new, flattering head shots for the occasion.
Let us know in the comment section: what you think about this new feature?
