Ninety two percent of the world’s population uses emojis, so I can safely assume that we’ve all been there: you’re texting a friend and suddenly your conversation calls for a very specific emoji, like a mail pigeon, or a ski-jumping T-Rex.
Now, the Unicode Consortium decides which emojis should be included in your default keyboard, but for reasons beyond me, it hasn’t yet introduced emojis to match my exact requests. So, what’s a girl to do when she’s texting her husband about their beloved mutt, Ollie, who has just stretched his front paws in a way that makes him look like a ski-jumper mid-air and, somehow, also a goofy T-Rex? Why is an emoji that can convey the extreme cuteness of the moment nowhere to be found?
Until recently, the only answer was two consecutive emojis: one for “skiing” and another for “T-Rex” which I was surprised to learn already had its own emoji. Now, I have at my disposal a glorious emoji of a T-Rex standing on two skis, gliding downhill. Perfection.
A fun new iOS app called Newji lets you turn your wildest, weirdest thoughts into an emoji by simply typing a prompt like you would in Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, and waiting a few seconds. You can download the app and generate emojis from there (provided you have cleared enough storage to upgrade your iPhone to iOS 17). You can also generate emojis from within iMessage or WhatsApp, which means you don’t have to switch apps, create the emoji then import it back when everyone else has already moved on.
Newji was designed by indie developers Ryan McLeod (whose portfolio includes the popular iOS game Blackbox) and Robert Long. Since launching in November 14, it has birthed more than 40,000 emojis. It is not the only AI emoji generator out there. Other options include AI Emoji Generator and EmojiGen, though both are browser-based, as well as a flurry of apps that let you create emoji mashups, build your own emojis—”like Mr. Potato Head where you swap out noses,” says McLeod—or even create your own stickers on. But Newji stands out with a delightful UI that is filled with playful interactions and Easter eggs.
“When designing Newji, I really wanted it to feel fun,” says McLeod. “There are so many AI apps that are basically text input boxes and loading spinners and it can just make an experience that should be kind of fun, sterile.” Newji has no text box per se. The home page consists of a floating text set against a canary yellow background: to get your creative juices flowing, the app beings to generate prompts as soon as you open it, then proceeds to show you the resulting emojis in bubbles that float up the screen then disappear: a cowboy cat, a flamingo playing the saxophone, a latte with a smiley face in the foam art.
When you’re done chuckling at the app’s default examples, you can get to work. Twenty prompts (bestowed upon you in the form of coins) cost 20 cents each. 300 prompts cost 5 cents each. (I received a voucher for 999 coins, at 3 cents each, allowing me to experiment to my heart’s content.)
When crafting your prompt, McLeoad says the more specific you can get, the better, though you must stick to 500 characters, which the developers set after someone pasted an entire B movie script into the text prompt. “You want to think about it as describing an image to someone who can’t see it, like alt-text,” he says. “Sometimes people get disappointed because it’s not what they had in their mind, but there’s nothing in the prompt to describe what they had in their mind.” If, say, you wanted to convey the sorry state of your MacBook after an egg carton broke in your backpack and the eggs cracked and ruined your laptop (which may or may not have happened to McLeod) then you would need to specify cracked eggs, not whole. And if you don’t get the emoji you wanted, you can prompt the app again, or in Newji speak, hit “reroll” and use up another coin.
While testing the app, I found that rerolling usually yielded significantly more accurate results than the original. For example, when I typed “climate change” (admittedly the opposite of a specific prompt) the app spat out an emoji of a man’s face. Weird. When I hit “reroll” it whisked up a round sphere that sort of looked like Planet Earth with trees that appeared to be wilting over it. Better. McLeod says the AI model has been trained to filter discriminatory prompts by pretty much ignoring words that may be considered offensive. Next up, the developers would like to give you the option to turn a photo into an emoji, or to specifically render your creations as little yellow circles in the style of Apple’s classic emojis.
I suspect despite all the improvements, Newji will never be perfect because AI is far from perfect. The developers know this all too well, so they opted for a design that doesn’t take itself too seriously: while the app is cooking up your emoji, for example, snarky comments appear on the screen, like “hello thing that didn’t exist 3 seconds ago,” or just, “yikes.” You can also poke the blob on the screen (where your emoji is being created) and feel it pulsing under the weight of your finger. “Beyond injecting some fun, the amorphic, bouncy, goofy design and sarcastic tone of voice is there intentionally to drive home that first and foremost this is a toy,” says McLeod. “It’s not magic, it’s not perfect, but it’s still a lot of fun, and when it’s good, it’s so, so good.”
Turn your wildest AI prompts into emojis with this quirky new app
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27.11.2023
Ninety two percent of the world’s population uses emojis, so I can safely assume that we’ve all been there: you’re texting a friend and suddenly your conversation calls for a very specific emoji, like a mail pigeon, or a ski-jumping T-Rex.
Now, the Unicode Consortium decides which emojis should be included in your default keyboard, but for reasons beyond me, it hasn’t yet introduced emojis to match my exact requests. So, what’s a girl to do when she’s texting her husband about their beloved mutt, Ollie, who has just stretched his front paws in a way that makes him look like a ski-jumper mid-air and, somehow, also a goofy T-Rex? Why is an emoji that can convey the extreme cuteness of the moment nowhere to be found?
Until recently, the only answer was two consecutive emojis: one for “skiing” and another for “T-Rex” which I was surprised to learn already had its own emoji. Now, I have at my disposal a glorious emoji of a T-Rex standing on two skis, gliding downhill. Perfection.
A fun new iOS app called Newji lets you turn your wildest, weirdest thoughts into an emoji by simply typing a prompt like you would in Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, and waiting a few seconds. You can download the app and generate emojis from there (provided you have cleared enough storage to upgrade your iPhone to iOS 17). You can also generate emojis........
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