This is Technology Bytes, episode 89 for November 17th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So as you know by now, I always am apparently on the developer beta for iOS, macOS, whatever other OSs are available.
And over the past number of weeks as I’ve been on the 18.2 beta, I’ve been waiting for access to more of the artistic intelligence from Apple Intelligence.
And so I spoke about that last week.
I spoke about image playground.
And so this week I’m going to cover another one of those topics and that is Genmoji.
I probably should have said that from the very beginning instead of rambling on.
But I want to give my initial thoughts as I generally do on new technology and then tell you my experience.
So probably a little bit shorter microcast this week because it’s a short topic and I haven’t used it to its fullest extent, I’m sure.
So what is Genmoji?
Well, what it is, is it’s a, you know, a mixed together of two words called generating would be the first and emoji being the second.
So the idea there is that there are numerous, almost more than you can imagine, probably more than you could really use, emojis that are available as reactions, generally used in talking through a texting platform.
In our case, in the Apple world, we use messages.
And so those reactions, thumbs up, smiley faces, sweating, slapping the hand to the face, broccoli.
I don’t know.
I don’t know how many there are actually.
There are hundreds, if not more than that.
And sometimes they’re hard to find, but sometimes you can’t find the one you actually want to use.
You can’t find something that represents close enough to the emotion that you’re feeling.
The word emoji is there, right?
But you keep searching.
And then the nice thing is that there is ways to search.
And so you can do that as well and try to find the right emoji.
But what Apple has done through this Apple intelligence and Genmoji is given you, us, all of us, the ability to create on the fly, something that matches exactly what we want to express in a small little emoji, icon, picture, whatever you want to call it.
So how does one go about using Genmoji?
Well, it’s very much like doing an emoji, except when you switch to the emoji keyboard, where you’ve got all those choices to choose from that are listed there, already pre-created, and most of them very good, and obviously covers a wide variety of topics and emotions and all those things.
But sometimes you just need something different, something special, something that sticks out.
And that’s where Genmoji comes in.
When you are in the emoji keyboard up in the right hand corner of the keyboard, not the screen, there’s a little button that you can choose to then generate a Genmoji to react to the text that you have.
Is it as fast as just choosing one that already exists?
No, but it has the ability to give you something that might not be available otherwise.
So I haven’t used it a ton at this point, but this weekend was my daughter’s birthday and we were gathering as a family to play pickleball.
So lots of texts going back and forth to get the schedule down, to get it correctly nailed down and make sure everybody knew what was going on.
And so when the text came and I really didn’t have anything to say to add to it at all, I thought, well, this is a perfect opportunity to use a Genmoji.
So I typed in pickleball and it gave me three or four different choices of Genmoji that it made.
And so I chose one very simple.
It’s a pickleball paddle with a green pickleball and attached that to the message as I would any other emoji.
And then I thought, I wonder if that already exists.
And even now, I’m not a hundred percent sure.
But when I talked to my son and said, you know, I used Genmoji to do that pickleball thing.
And I said, I’m not a hundred percent sure if that already existed.
And he said, no, I’ve been looking for that.
I always look for that one to try to use because he plays way more pickleball than I do.
And he goes, when I saw it pop up in our message stream, I thought, oh, my dad found one.
I’ve never seen that before.
And then I remembered that my dad’s on the beta and probably used Genmoji.
And now my son is on the beta.
He finally got, I think last night, invited to the image playground Genmoji world.
But it worked so well and it was so easy and it really didn’t take all that much time.
I just described what I wanted to say in an emoji and it made one for me.
So I think this is probably, well, it’s not necessarily groundbreaking or just can’t live without.
It is something that Apple is providing that I think is a good service.
And from what I’ve used to this point, the different ones I’ve tested out, it does a good job of making a good emoji that fits what you described.
And then the other thing you can do is use it as a sticker so that you have other opportunities to use those that you have generated.
So it’s not like it’s a one-time generation and then it goes away.
You actually get to use it over and over again.
So the next time we get together playing pickleball, I will be able to use the one that I made to react to messages when it is appropriate.
Sometimes I get lazy when it comes to new technologies from Apple.
And while I think they’re cool, I don’t find time to study them so that I can use them properly to see their weaknesses and their strength.
But I hope to do that in the not-too-distant future with Genmoji, as I said last week, trying to do that with the image playground.
So you can expect in the not-too-distant future more microcasts covering those two topics.
But as for today, I think that is all I have.
And if you have any comments, questions, suggestions, the ways you’ve used Genmoji or image playground, you can send them to me at technologybytes at merigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
