GOOGLE has baffled Android users with a bizarre new ‘audio emoji’ feature that interrupts phone calls.
Gone are the days of silent emoji – Google is trying to popularise a new breed of emoticons nearly three decades after their inception.
Audio emoji let users reply in calls with sound-assisted animations inside Google’s phone app.
There are six different audio emoji to choose from:
- Drum roll
- Sad
- Applause
- Party popper
- Laughter
- Poop
If you’re yet to come across the feature, picture this: your friend gets a promotion and you supplement your congratulations with an applause audio emoji.
If they’re anything like messenger emojis, this is just the beginning.
But Android users are struggling to find the fun in the new feature.
“Why on Earth we need this?,” one onlooker asked on X (formerly Twitter).
Another added: “Literally just not needed, instead of building features like Apple’s live voicemail they wasting time on this.”
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A third person simply called it “Another useless feature to kill in 3 months.”
Where did emoji come from?
Emojis as we know them first emerged in the late 1990s in Japan.
Phone companies were inspired by the symbols used in manga comics and Japanese weather forecasts.
Initially, there were about 90 emoji on the J-Phone back in 1997.
By 2010, the number had swelled to nearly 1000.
Today, that number stands at over 3,500 emoji – with companies like Apple and Google introducing new symbols every year.
Before they landed on phones, text-based symbols such as 🙂 and 🙁 were popularised with the dawn of the computer.
We’ve known that the Google Phone app was getting audio emoji since late February.
Trusted leaker site TheSpAndroid discovered code in a beta version of the phone app.
It’s unclear if Google has plans to improve the feature, or roll our more audio emoji.
Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, is taking place in a couple of weeks, so we may get more information then.
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