EasyEmojis | Devpost

Inspiration

Using emojis is fun, but chances are you send happy, sad, and angry faces all with a straight face. Texting and messaging has become inauthentic and impersonal. We've created Easy Emojis to bring some of the fun back into online text communication.

What it does

EasyEmojis is a custom keyboard that works just like the current one on your phone, except it has one extra button. Pressing this button will let the phone camera take a picture of your current expression, match that expression to an emoji, and directly insert that emoji to where your cursor is in the current text field!

How we built it

The project was made in 3 major steps: creation of the custom keyboard as an android app service, opening the camera from the keyboard, and doing the emoji - matching through API calls.

Challenges we ran into

By far, the biggest problem we ran into is that none of us had built an app before, so it was very difficult to work with Android Studio. Many logistical issues with Android Studio slowed down our progress. This along with the fact that there are very few resources online for creating keyboards in Android were the biggest challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While we were not able to fit the whole project into one app, we were able to implement all of the features we planned to over two separate applications!

What we learned

Set out to implement a simple idea if you are working with new technology

What's next for EasyEmojis

In the future, the first step is to actually integrate both parts of the project into one app. Then, we would like to have the camera open directly in place of the keyboard so that an emoji can be seamlessly inserted into a message. Currently, pressing the button opens the whole camera app which slows down the whole process of inserting an emoji. Also, we plan on supporting more emojis in the future since currently our app can only insert a small subset of all of the general emojis that come with a device's keyboard.