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Now you can replace your face with a giant cat emoji in Snapchat videos

Snapchat
Shutterstock/Focal Point
Your snaps are about to get a whole lot more cartoonish — especially if you’re an emoji fan.

To date you’ve been able to include emojis in your snaps, but they’ve been stationary, simply sitting within the video. Now, Snapchat is changing the way emojis behave in videos. When you put an emoji on your face, it moves with you in the video. Android and iOS users can move, rotate, and scale their emojis within videos on Snapchat.

Basically, you can now stick a big ol’ yellow smiley face over the top of your face and have it move around the screen with you. Don’t worry, if you happen to have more than one person in your snap, you can attach emoji to multiple faces, too. And you’re not limited to popping emojis on faces, either. You want a plane to fly around the screen? No problem. If you’re against change and want to stick with static emojis, you’ll also still be able to keep them in one place.

Related: Buy the LG G5 and get a free battery and cradle bundle

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen moving stickers in an app. YouTube built a similar feature right into its video editor. Not only that, but Snapchat has been moving in this direction for months now, with its various animations. Sure, it’s a small update, but it will certainly help users get a little more creative on the app.

Its willingness to experiment has helped Snapchat remain popular over the years. While simple video messaging is cool enough, Snapchat knows that it can’t expect its users to do the same thing for years on end. Allowing users to get more creative generates more views, which in turn helps increase Snapchat’s appeal to advertisers.

To take advantage of the new feature yourself, you’ll need to update Snapchat on your phone. Snapchat also revealed that its lenses will now work on more iOS devices, including the iPhone 4S, fifth-generation iPod Touch, and second-generation iPad.

via GIPHY

Updated on 04-19-2016 by Malarie Gokey: Added news that it’s on iOS, too.

Christian de Looper
Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…
You can now video chat with a ChatGPT AI — here’s what it looks like
Call Annie ChatGPT app on an iPhone.

Showing up to a videoconference as your digital avatar can be quite fun. Apple lets you do just that with Memojis during FaceTime. If you want something more ambitious on a different platform, Avatarify will turn into Albert Einstien or Mona Lisa for Zoom calls. But what if you could bring an AI conversation to life? Say, by talking to ChatGPT as if OpenAI’s AI was a CGI person talking to you on a video call?
Well, that’s now possible. Call Annie is an app that turns ChatGPT into Annie, a talking female avatar that doesn’t look like a glitchy visual mess. Developed by Animato.Ai, the app is currently exclusive to iOS 16, but you can also use it on macOS 13 machines with an M-series processor inside.

A ChatGPT-powered video call in action
https://twitter.com/frantzfries/status/1651316031762071553?s=20
Another limitation is that you need at least the iPhone 12 or a later model to start a video call with Annie because the real-time conversion of linguistic prompts into visual cues draws power from Apple’s Neural Engine.
The app’s makers claim that talking to Annie “face-to-face in real time time feels more natural and faster than typing and reading text.” So far, the sample videos we have seen on social media, like the one above, show a fairly convincing video call interface.
Right now, Annie appears to be pretty good at holding a fluent conversation, even though the voice sounds robotic, and the phrase pausing could also use some work. The answers, however, are typical of the answers you would get while texting back-and-forth with ChatGPT. And given enough time and improved voice training, Call Annie interactions can become a lot more natural-sounding.
It all brings back memories of the sci-fi flick Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with one such AI. One user asked on Reddit whether Annie can have a “memory” system that will turn it into a smarter “friend,” to which the app developers replied with “soon.”
https://twitter.com/jakedahn/status/1651285054591750144
This is only the beginning for Annie
Users who have tried the app note that it occasionally flubs the pronunciation of words, but once corrected, it also learns right away. One user described this experience as “scary stuff.”Another issue it has is with pronouncing words in languages other than English, something that the developers are trying to fix.
Thanks to its ChatGPT smarts, the app’s developers say it can help you with everything from learning and web searches to serving as a tour guide or even a virtual companion. We don’t know if it’s as smart as other virtual partner apps like Replika, but considering the fact that Annie is based on ChatGPT (and its vast data training model), you can have a significantly deeper and fact-driven conversation with Annie.
Animato’s App Store description notes that the AI keeps all conversations “confidential” but hasn’t specified what kind of security measures have been put in place and whether it uses the user conversations for training and refining Annie’s systems.

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Check your Apple Card right now — you may have a crazy 10% cash-back promo
Daily Cash page for the Apple Card, showing a 10% back promo for grocery store purchases.

If you’re an Apple Card user, you may want to check if you have a new offer waiting for you that will net you up to 10% cash back on grocery store purchases. Yes, you read that correctly — 10% cash back.

Apple is quietly boosting Apple Card rewards with this new promotion that seems to only be available to select users through May 31. The timing of this offer follows the launch of the Apple Card Savings account earlier in the month.

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Bluesky barrels toward 1 million new sign-ups in a day
Bluesky social media app logo.

Social media app Bluesky has picked nearly a million new users just a day after exiting its invitation-only beta and opening to everyone.

In a post on its main rival -- X (formerly Twitter) -- Bluesky shared a chart showing a sudden boost in usage on the app, which can now be downloaded for free for iPhone and Android devices.

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