How AI Could Wipe Out Emoji 😱👋

Over 90% of the world’s online population uses emoji. In case you are the remaining 10%, emoji are small icons used while text messaging or online. They can represent an emotion 😢, an object 🎸or an activity 🏇, just to name few options. Out of over 2000 existing official Unicode emoji, face with tears of joy 😂 is said to be the most popular, followed by smiling face with heart-shaped eyes 😍. But be careful, apart from serving as pictograms, emoji might also have some hidden meaning.

Emoji are everywhere. They are on new MacBook Pro keyboards, cinema screens, billboards. In fact, more than 6 billion are sent every day. One of the few place where they surprisingly didn’t appear yet (at least to my knowledge) is President Trump’s tweets. You may think that age is behind this, but actually gender is a larger factor in emoji use. Perhaps that’s why Ivanka uses them with such an ease.

Even though they are omnipresent now, emoji's demise might be coming, and the World Emoji Day celebrated last month might not be observed in a couple of years from now. The reason is simple — we might soon start relying on conversing with technology, rather than typing.

“The fact that you can’t speak in emoji might actually be the end of the damn things,” writes Kevin Maney for Newsweek.

In a witty opinion piece, we learn how Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and other AI could wipe emoji out. The article is far from revelatory, but it is a pleasant and engaging read, especially if you aren't an emoji enthusiast yourself.