Transform Your Selfies Into Emoji Via Google Allo

Emoji are cool and all, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to customize them into something that resembles us just a little bit? Well, Google Allo has got you all covered. Google has just rolled out a new feature in its Allo app that basically allows users to create custom emoji out of their own selfie face. For those still not familiar with Allo, it is actually the first product from Google that showcased the now familiar Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that provides automatically generated replies (Smart Replies) and other artificial intelligence generated recommendations relevant to the user’s daily routine or preferences.

So how exactly does this selfie to emoji feature on Allow work? For starters, Google has made clever use of neural networks, plus the artistic talents of illustrators, in helping users transform their emotive selfies into personally jazzed up emoticons. It goes without saying that morphing human faces into cute pictogram representations is no walk in the park, especially for a machine. With humans, it is easy to take the concept of facial recognition for granted -- our brains are so used to scanning the basic features like eye color and then retrieving the relevant information that corresponds to the identity of that specific feature on a person’s face. Powerful as they are, computers of today still have a long way to go in matching the human brain in terms of identifying faces or even parts of faces. So what Google’s team was rely on neural networks, which refer to computer systems that basically behave like human brains, that is, continuously absorb new information while at the same time, learning from past data already recorded.

With the area of facial recognition covered, Google then turned its attention to the emoji part. What makes emoji so fun and addictive is their cute factor, but Google had to break down emoji into the most basic parts, i.e. eye expressions, mouth shapes, hairstyles, and other specific elements that can help differentiate a smiling emoji from a crying emoji. The tech giant then teamed up with artists to come up with illustrations that represent different types of those elements. With so many different eye expressions, mouth shapes, and hairstyles, the number of combinations is sure to be high. Google estimates that number to over 563 quadrillion combinations. With that “database” already created, it is just a matter of choosing which specific elements match a user’s face. Then after that, tadaaah -- users got themselves their own customized emoji based on their selfie.