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Business News/ Technology / News/  Millennials replace emojis with stickers thanks to ML
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Millennials replace emojis with stickers thanks to ML

Various keyboard and messaging platforms now understand what youngsters want, and are investing to expand their content offerings in these areas
  • Using stickers as primary mode of input or more often (than before) in the conversation has become a lot more convenient for users
  • Bobble Keyboard has an ML-based recommendation engine for stickers that can suggest stickers based on chats as well as the context within a sticker (iStock)Premium
    Bobble Keyboard has an ML-based recommendation engine for stickers that can suggest stickers based on chats as well as the context within a sticker (iStock)

    New Delhi: Millennial chats on messengers are evolving from just plain text to stickers, graphics interchange format (GIFs) and emojis. The reason: Various keyboard and messaging platforms now understand what youngsters want, and are investing to expand their content offerings in these areas.

    While popular platforms like WhatsApp allow users to get stickers from their library or even use third-party stickers from the Play Store, messaging platform Hike is using machine learning (ML) to build its own library of custom stickers that allows users to carry out the entire conversation in stickers.

    Among keyboard apps, Bobble, which boasts of around 10,000 to 15,000 unique stickers developed in-house or with the assistance of freelance graphic designers, has got stickers that not only enable day-to-day conversations, but are also allowing users to personalize existing stickers by adding their own face onto them. The idea is to make stickers cover larger aspects of life and conversations.

    “We’ve been trying to solve a problem for some time, which is how do we take the world beyond the keyboard, because while it is very efficient, it limits the expression to characters and texts," said Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO of Hike. During their research, Bobble found that in India users prefer stickers during festivals, as conversation starters or while chatting with dates. “Users prefer stickers and GIFs as they allow them to express their feelings better," said Ankit Prasad, founder and CEO, Bobble AI. While stickers are cool and millennials love them, finding the right sticker without wasting time can be a nightmare. Based on user feedback, Hike found that a lot of users were having trouble finding the right sticker. Which is what led them to build an ML-based recommendation engine for stickers that can suggest stickers based on chats as well as the context within a sticker. So if two users are conversing with stickers in Bengali they will get sticker suggestions in the same language.

    To scale up the sticker library so they can cater to a wider demographic of users in multiple languages, Hike decided to take advantage of ML in the development process as well. It allowed them to assemble components on the fly based on what users may want. Mittal points out, “we have thousands of components, fonts, templates, colour combinations ready in different languages and emotions. The machine is taking all this basic intelligence and pulling things together to create millions of high quality stickers." Hike has created a library of over 1 million stickers using ML.

    With access to faster internet speeds and more powerful smartphones even in budget segment, using stickers as primary mode of input or more often (than before) in the conversation has become a lot more convenient for users. Prasad adds, “with better internet, more people carrying out online conversation, and with higher needs to be more expressive, unique and personal, formats like stickers will not only grow, but more such formats will emerge in the future."

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    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Abhijit Ahaskar
    Abhijit writes on tech policy, gaming, security, AI, robotics, electronics and startups. He has been in the media industry for over 12 years.
    Catch all the Technology News and Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.
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    Published: 12 Sep 2019, 11:28 PM IST
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