Teaching Robots to Feel: Emoji & Deep Learning

Recently, neural networks have become the tool of choice for a variety of tough computer-science problems: Facebook uses them to identify faces in photos, Google uses them to identify everything in photos. Apple uses them to figure out what you're saying to Siri, and IBM uses them for operationalizing business unit synergies. Can neural networks help you find the emoji when you really need it? This post will outline some of the engineering behind Dango, allowing us to automatically learn from hundreds of millions of real-world uses of emoji, and distill this down to a tool small and fast enough to predict emoji for you in real time on your phone. Dango is a floating assistant that runs on your phone and predicts emoji, stickers and GIFs based on what you and your friends are writing in any app.