This Neural Network's Emoji Game Is Stronger Than Yours

Right now, there are 1,851 emojis supported by the Unicode Consortium, including everything from a purple eggplant to a ghost with its tongue sticking out. But despite the runaway popularity of these curious cartoon symbols, the way we actually type out emojis is very primitive: a tiny separate keyboard on our smartphones, roughly organized by category, that even the best emoji users haven't so much mastered as partially memorized. "Emoji has a big UI problem," says Xavier Snelgrove. It's a problem that his company, Whirlscape, is trying to solve with artificial intelligence. The company has created an Android app called Dango that uses recurring neural networks to automatically predict what emojis you want to use based on your message.