SwiftKey's new Swiftmoji keyboard will help predict your emoji

When you struggle to find the right words or don’t really care to do so, you can turn to emoji to convey your thoughts and feelings. But in those times when a suitable emoji seems to elude you, SwiftKey’s new Swiftmoji app will toss you a shortlist of suggestions for the correct face, figure or finger.

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Swiftmoji is SwiftKey’s first product since Microsoft acquired the popular keyboard earlier this year. Swiftmoji relies on context and trends to provide you with emoji recommendations. To help make sense of the sentiment behind the estimated six billion emoji sent every day, Swiftmoji will lean on the same artificial intelligence system that powers SwiftKey Keyboard’s predictive text and autocorrect features.

The new app will suss out emoji trends from an assortment of publicly available data, along with aggregated and anonymized data users have elected to share with the SwiftKey team, according to SwiftKey spokesperson Nicky Budd-Thanos. “This is done in the overwhelming majority by AI,” Budd-Thanos said. “but given that some of these predictions come from public sources like Twitter which may have undesirable or offensive trends, we’ve worked hard to reduce the chances of people being offered emoji predictions that might cause offense.”

The SwiftKey team will ensure that Swiftmoji’s data is updated regularly to reflect the latest trends in emoji. Last month, the group released a mid-year round up of some of the most popular emoji during the first half of the year.

Swiftmoji, a standalone app, serves as an add-on emoji keyboard for iOS and an entire keyboard replacement for Android, though it does support third-party messaging apps. So are you going to give Swiftmoji a try or will you pick your emoji the old-fashioned way, by hand?