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

By Christian de Looper April 19, 2016

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.

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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.

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

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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Call Annie ChatGPT app on an iPhone.

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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.
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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.
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