The competition to best Apple’s Animoji is heating up.
Android keyboard TouchPal added its own AR Emoji to its keyboard app.
AR Emoji will work on any Android phone that can download the keyboard. Furthermore, the app doesn’t use any special sensors. Instead, it just uses the front-facing camera to map the emoji to your face. Importantly, these work even if you wear glasses.
TouchPal, developed by Shanghai-based CooTek, offers four different animated characters. Users can assume the form of a polar bear, gingerbread man, gorilla or a ‘capsule.’
It’s not entirely clear what the capsule is. It appears to be a pill-like character with hair and headphones — perhaps a member of the legendary Mighty Beanz.
Despite the odd unidentifiable character, TouchPal’s design team did a good job. The characters all look fairly cute. Furthermore, the characters don’t exude any off-putting vibes, like other augmented reality emoji offerings.
While there may not be a lot of character choices, they work well. I personally think it’s more important to form a solid base to build from.
Which is what the TouchPal team is working on now — they have more characters in the pipeline.
Along with the new AR Emoji, the TouchPal keyboard offers a number of features including keyboard themes, stickers and more.
CooTek recently updated TouchPal with some artificial intelligence features too. That includes a digital assistant named Talia.
The digital assistant can help users by suggesting GIFs, weather information and more. Talia can also perform simple calculations and makes it easier to cut and paste information.
TouchPal’s recent features definitely make it a strong keyboard contender. It claims to be one of the most popular alternative keyboards on Android. Considering the wealth of features it offers, it isn’t hard to see why.
However, TouchPal isn’t the only keyboard with AR emoji out there. Baidu’s Facemoji keyboard also features AR characters that map to your face.
TouchPal can be downloaded from the Google Play Store here.
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