Microsoft Adds Mojis to Skype

Microsoft Adds Mojis to Skype

While Skype has long supported emoticons and emojis, Microsoft is taking it to the next level—or a new nadir, depending on your perspective—by adding support for Mojis, short video clips from favorite movies and TV shows.

“Sometimes real life feels like it’s straight out of a movie and mere words just don’t do it justice,” Microsoft’s Francesca Bassa explains in a post to the Skype Big Blog. “Now, when you send a message on Skype, you can personalize your chat and pull in your favorite TV or movie moments to do the talking for you. Mojis are short clips from your favorite movies and TV shows that you can put directly into a Skype chat when words aren’t enough to capture for that ‘ah-hah,’ ‘haha,’ or ‘yikes’ moment.”

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To me, Mojis are the Skype equivalent of the animated GIFs that people sometimes send as humorous responses to tweets and other posts.

I also happened to discover that emoticons and emojis are different things when researching for this post. (Some has to do it.) That is, emoticons are typographical representations of facial expressions used to convey emotion is purely textual situations. The classic being the smiley face:

emote

Emojis, meanwhile, are actual pictures that can replace emoticons in more sophisticated communications solutions. So instead of a colon and close parenthesis for a smiley face, you can have an actual picture of a smiling face.

smiley

Skype, like some other communications products, will actually use an emoji instead of a emoticon when possible. (If you find that annoying—I do—then you can just disable it.)

And now Skype supports a new type of expression.

According to Microsoft, it has “scoured the archives and handpicked the funniest, craziest, and most iconic moments from some of the best TV and movies out there.” It is teaming with Universal Studios, Disney Muppets, BBC and other studios around the world, and in this initial release there are Moji’s from films such as Despicable Me, Bridesmaids, Pitch Perfect, and Jurassic Park, as well as The Muppets. More are coming soon.

Adding a Moji to a message is simple enough, as Microsoft is adding a Moji tab to the emotion picker (yep, it’s a thing) in Skype. So look for that in a future update.

And God help any one of my contacts who sends me such a thing. 🙂

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