It’s World Emoji Day today and it celebrates the plethora of digital images and emoticons that we use every day to express emotions, and add flair to our otherwise usually bland texts. Here's how tech biggies are marking the occasion.
July 17 is celebrated as the World Emoji Day and this was unofficially declared by Jeremy Burge in 2014, who is a London-based founder of the website Emojipedia. This day is a celebration of the digital images/icons used by smartphone users across the world in their conversations to express an emotion in an otherwise bland piece of electronic communication. Even though World Emoji Day is an unofficial holiday, some companies understand the attachment users have with emojis as they are used on a daily basis to show emotions like 
, 
, 
and more. Hence, some companies use the day for announcing new emojis, emoji based products and statistics related to emoji usage. Apple, Google and Facebook are all celebrating World Emoji Day 2018 in their own unique ways. Take a look.
Apple
Apple has showcased 70 new emojis on World Emoji Day 2018, which will be made available on its devices later this year. To enable users to express and represent themselves better, the company will be adding emojis for people with red hair, curly hair and grey hair, along with new smileys that include a cold face, party face, pleading face, and face with hearts. However, the company’s most fun take on this day has to be the revamped Leadership webpage as Apple has replaced the portrait photos of its top executives like Tim Cook, Katherine Adams, Craig Federighi and others, with their memojis. The image below shows that Apple is not all work and no play.
Who says that working with AI can’t be fun? Google is celebrating the World Emoji Day with an AI Experiment called Emoji Scavenger Hunt. It is an experiment that makes use of neural networks, image recognition and your phone’s camera to hunt and identify “the real world versions of the emojis we use every day.” It is a fun way to spend a couple of minutes (or an entire hour!), playing the game and test out how well you know your emojis and if you can find a replacement for them in real life. We also tried it and it challenged us to find a dustbin, a keyboard and a pair of sunglasses. You can see from the image below that we did find the two items in a matter of seconds, however, it mistook some random objects for sunglasses. You can play the game here.
Lastly, Facebook has shared some metrics like, which is the most used emojis on its platform, what emoji is rising fast in terms of usage and more. As per the company, users are showing more love to the emoji as it’s now being used twice as much as it was used last year. Also, there are more than 2,800 emojis on Facebook and almost 2,300 of them are said to be used every day. Emojis have not only taken over Facebook. Over 900M emojis are sent every day without any text on Messenger, while more than 700M emojis are used in Facebook posts every day. As per Facebook, around the world, emojis are most used on New Year's Eve. The company is also launching some few new features like a camera frame and themed text feature for people who want to celebrate World Emoji Day. Here is Facebook’s infographic for the World Emoji Day 2018. So, make the best of this World Emoji Day and keep on emoting, till next time 
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Shubham Sharma
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