Leading by example? The Apple bosses replaced their official photos with cartoonish Memoji characters.
Apple and Google are getting into the fun of World Emoji Day, celebrating the silly day with new emoji characters and gags involving their bosses and a scavenger hunt game.
Apple announced it will be adding more than 70 new emoji characters to its products as part of the coming iOS 12 update.
"This include even more hair options to better represent people with red hair, gray hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people, and new smiley faces that bring more expression to Messages with a cold face, party face, pleading face and a face with hearts," says Apple on its newsroom.
In addition to humanoid faces, there's also new animal emoji characters like a kangaroo, peacock, parrot and lobster, and food emoji for mango, lettuce, cupcake, and moon cake.
Even Apple's top 17 bosses replaced their official photographs with Memoji versions, including CEO Tim Cook, senior vice president Katherine Adams, chief design officer Jonathan Ive, and chief operating officer Jeff Williams.
Meanwhile, Google has prepared an Emoji Scavenger Hunt mini-game that requires users to match emoji characters to real world objects.
"Locate the emoji we show you in the real world with your phone’s camera. A neural network will try to guess what it’s seeing," says Google on its page.
Users need to match 10 emoji with their in-real-life counterparts within 20 seconds per item.
Google also revealed its 10 most frequently used emoji characters in Gboard: the laugh out loud (LOL) emote took first place, followed by the kissing with hearts emoji, then the heart eyes emoji, the love emoji and smiling emoji.
Gboard is Google’s virtual keyboard for Android and iOS and features little pudding-shaped yellow icons animated with a range of emotions from amused to confused.
If you're wondering why July 17 was chosen as World Emoji Day, it's because the calendar emoji displays July 17, which is the date that iCal for Mac was first announced at MacWorld Expo in 2002.
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