Emoticons or emojis have become an essential part of everyday communication via email or text messages. The reason behind their immense popularity is because they simply convey all of the human emotions which are rather difficult to express in plain words for everyone unless they have a degree in literature and creative writing. This is also why emojis are no part of almost all the social networking apps like Facebook or Twitter and even keyboard apps like GBoard.
And now the Redmond giant Microsoft has created an open-source experimental app for Windows called Emoji8 that can detect your facial expressions as you try to imitate the emojis being displayed. It is a very simple app and is created only to show off the capabilities of Microsoft’s Machine Learning (ML) API. Microsoft has releases this app through Microsoft Store but has also released the source-code over GitHub.
The Emoji8 app requires Windows 10 October 2018 update (Windows 10 version 1809) and a front-facing webcam through which your facial expressions will be captured. The app displays various emojis and you have to make your facial expressions to match the emojis. It takes in a video feed from your computer’s webcam and evaluates your facial expressions while you imitate a random selection of emojis such as neutral, happiness, sadness, surprise, etc. The app rates your facial expressions in terms of percentage. The top scoring facial expressions can be converted into a GIF animation and shared over Twitter with your friends and followers.
This app does not do anything serious. It is designed just for fun and you can share your facial expression skills to your Twitter friends. But what Microsoft is really trying to do is advertise about their Machine Language API and targeting the developers all over the world.
You can download the Emoji8 app from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/emoji8/9n5vj4hkp6x1.