A new app uses AI to turn your smiles and frowns into emoji

A new app is trying to make it simpler to help you react to photos and videos that your friends post online--it's using AI to capture your facial expressions and automatically translate them into a range of emoji faces. Polygram, which is free and available only for the iPhone for now, is a social app that lets you share things like photos, videos, and messages. Unlike on, say, Facebook, though, where you have a small range of pre-set reactions to choose from beyond clicking a little thumbs-up icon, Polygram uses a neural network that runs locally on the phone to figure out if you're smiling, frowning, bored, embarrassed, surprised, and more. Marcin Kmiec, one of Polygram's cofounders, says the app's AI works by capturing your face with the front-facing camera on the phone and analyzing sequences of images as quickly as possible, rather than just looking at specific points on the face like your pupils and nose. This is done directly on the phone, using the iPhone's graphics processing unit, he says.