It seems every single app wants to have some sort of take on Animoji. Even third-party keyboard apps aren’t safe. SwiftKey Beta is trying this feature out on its own with a new feature called Puppets. It’ll let you record yourself as one of these five animals: dinosaur, cat, owl, dog, or panda. Like all incarnations of this feature, it makes use of your phone’s camera to track your facial movements. Of course, it has the help of artificial intelligence to make this possible. And since it is part of your keyboard app, it’ll work with just about any app. You can record clips of up to 30 seconds long and you can choose to leave in the sound you recorded or just mute it. It is, as we mentioned, shareable wherever you want to.
At this moment there is no native still capture button, so if you want stills, you need to export the clip and screenshot. Ease of use varies as well. As Android Central points out, if you send it through Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram, then you need to select the recipient again even if you’re in the message thread with them. Also, it can’t track mouth movements as well right now, but it’s understandable since this is the beta version. Here’s to hoping SwiftKey tweaks this for the official release.