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Apple Explains How iOS 18 Genmoji Work
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I love how the irony is lost on you. I mean your profile pic is a Memoji which shows how you live in the world.
Also pictures being used for words has been around for thousands of years. In more recent use cases it has made for icons to be identifiable and useful in a technological world.
The fact that people like to use them for communication is something that makes people express themselves when words are not enough.
My mom's religious group uses Viber to chat. They love send each other stickers. I don't know where they get them from. Viber must have some sort of sticker based economy. As far as I know Viber isn't a big thing with kids
It's just a fun thing to do. It breaks up the monotony of endless text bubbles. It's why meme generators exist
Out of touch 60 year old boomers: The Thread: Electric Boogaloo
You're right, but not for the reasons you think.
Ever watched closely what a lot of kids do with phones now? Not so much typing furiously on the keyboard - a lot more holding it at an odd angle and talking at it, or holding it out bottom-speaker to the ear. What's going on?
They don't use text anymore. They record messages - not necessarily conversational either; more like 2-3 min missives often - send them, then listen to anything received back at their leisure. This is nice because it gives back the nuances of vocal intonation, but less nice because that's not the only reason - another oft-cited reason is that they're too busy to even look at the screen anymore! Kids believe that they can fully multitask over at least two things, one being to listen or speak to the phone, the other being - well, whatever. Your hands and eyes are free.
The "out of touch" thing here appears to be - surprisingly - in Apple's domain. The focus on text-based representation is archaic and bizarre. On the one hand, perhaps they've given up trying to be Down With The Kids and marketing to them. But on the other hand, things like Memoji or Genmoji are naff, puerile, patronising features; assuming kids aren't turned away by the outdated faux-Pixar styling, the features could surely only be aimed at that age group and not adults (even in the current 'kidult' phase society seems to have hit).
Now, this is an NZ perspective and also something seen rising fast in China now for over a decade, where the difficulty of typing "native" characters and very cheap data rates accelerated the switch. This might be less in the USA, possibly, but in that case Apple's being relentlessly xenophobic and certainly sabotaging their efforts to expand in the Far East.
So yeah. Shrug. I don't get it. I stopped used memoji basically after the first try - hideous, to my eyes, but I thought I'd see the reaction; first one I sent to my own mum was met with "what's that, it's awful!". She wasn't wrong. Genmoji are just the same ugly looking things, but generated less efficiently. Uuuuh - OK...
(Edited to add, for background: I'm 49 y/o and appropriately cantankerous).
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Nailed it- this is so painfully spot on and mirrors what I see all over the world, outside the United States that is. It’s also a pretty bleak condemnation of the fact that Apple is navel gazing with this feature. It’s designed by a committee of marketers that think this is what “THE YOUTH OF TODAY” want. It’s very concerning it made it out the door and didn’t find its way to the cutting room floor.
It’s a feature for kids and adults who likes to have fun once in a while.
Exactly right. I think most people underestimate how hard it is to design a pictograph that will be even nearly universally interpreted the same way. And that’s with fixed pictographs, without generating a new one on the spot. And if AI is generating based on conversation context, can it generate a slightly different one next time? If it does, is the reader left wondering if there is some “additional” meaning to be inferred? It all sounds counter-productive to me.
Back in the day when lots of applications started using icons for functions and function menus, I would always look for an option to just use text and enable that. Spending even two seconds wondering “WTF is this thing supposed to mean?” was a waste of two seconds in my book.
The Microsoft and Apple versions are the best in my opinion.
And yeah, that’s true. But only between different platforms/OS
For those with a taste for the classics, I recommend Jonathan Swift's vision of what a life full of emojis/genmojis would be like. Part 3, chapter 5 of Gulliver's Travels. Find the section on the researchers trying to eliminate words.
First time I read it, the part about the poor dog with the bellows stuck up its ass almost made me sick from laughter. (That's a different part of the chapter, not relevant, it's just one of the funniest things ever written.)
First time I read it, the part about the poor dog with the bellows stuck up its ass almost made me sick from laughter. (That's a different part of the chapter, not relevant, it's just one of the funniest things ever written.)