Keyboard app maker SwiftKey has released a new predictive keyboard for Android and iOS that will predict which emoji are best used to “pepper up” your emails or messages.
Available from today, the new keyboard, called Swiftmoji, works in conjunction with your current keyboard offering, but like the original keyboard product from the company did with words, will predict the best emoji to use.
"With over 1,800 emoji to choose from on your phone and more added regularly, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the right emoji," explains the company. "Swiftmoji removes the frustration of playing hunt-the-emoji - and helps you discover new emoji you may have never even seen before - with its spot-on predictions."
Emoji, which are becoming more and more popular, are also becoming more and more harder to remember given the huge number of them now available.
The app works by using the context of what you're typing coupled with worldwide emoji trends to give you the best and most topical emoji predictions so you don't have to remember each and every one of them.
"The emoji predictions are designed to help find a specific emoji you're after, or give you some ideas if you're short of inspiration. The second use case is interesting as we found that most people just continually use the same small subset of emoji and don't know about many of the 1,800 that exist," a spokesman for the company told Pocket-lint.
Rather than just suggest you add a football when you’ve typed the word football, it could suggest a number of other possibilities around the game.
Emoji keyboards are all the rage at the moment with even Apple confirming it will offer an auto-suggesting emoji feature on its keyboard in iOS 10.
Where the new keyboard differs from Apple’s new auto suggesting emoji tech in iOS 10 though is that rather than automatically offer to highlight and replace based on specific words, it will recommend a number of suggestions. You will also have to switch keyboards for the effects to take place when using the Swiftmoji keyboard on Apple devices.
A quick play of the app on the iPhone ahead of the official launch shows that the implementation suffers from the same problems many keyboards do on iOS; you have to switch between keyboards to get the emoji predictions.
If you are happy to do that the predictions are spot on though, as long as there is text to analyse.
That might force people to either forget they have the keyboard installed or find it frustrating to have to go in after the fact. Android users should find switching to the new SwiftKey powered keyboard a lot easier.
In comparison, Apple’s iOS 10 emoji keyboard interplay is much more intuitive and flowing.
One feature we do like however is the ability to "emoji bomb". The feature allows you to ado up to 18 related emoji in by pressing a single button.
Swiftmoji is currently only available in English on both iOS and Android devices. However Swiftmoji on iOS is an emoji keyboard, whereas Swiftmoji on Android is a full keyboard replacement.