GIFs (an acronym that stands for Graphics Interchange Format) have recently been one of the most common and popular ways to communicate in social network and normal smartphone conversations. Similarly to what happened with emoticons a few years ago, GIFs offer a nice opportunity to express feelings, ideas and quickly describe situations without spending too much time writing words. Just like a very short movie footage, these animated images are rapidly gaining more traction every day even in global media such as the Washington Post, where they started substituting traditional jpegs and videos.
Many companies started the integration process by making them more accessible in their own apps. Jumping on the bandwagon is, in fact, more important than ever since GIF support has finally reached even the latest WhatsApp’s update. There’s no doubt that millions of users are not going to lose the opportunity to edit their own media, caption it, and make it into an animated picture for everyone to share. Unfortunately, most solutions currently available lack the adequate options to add substance and context to the GIFs, due to their intrinsically limited functionality. And here comes the novelty: Guggy.
The new software coded by the Israeli cousins Rotem and Shahar Yakir, provides both end users and developers with a quick and smart solution to add that much-needed additional layer of quirkiness and awesomeness to their conversations. Guggy uses a solid Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine that analyzes the text written by the users, matches it with an accurately chosen comic GIF, and then overlays it on top of it almost instantly.
As Rotem Yakir, CEO of Guggy, correctly pointed out in his press release: “right now, GIF providers return results that feel random and irrelevant.” He and his cousin released Guggy as an API, so any developer can tweak with it to add additional functions to their apps. Guggy will work on most digital platforms such as iOS, Android, iMessage, Slack and many others, and can also be integrated into any app or service both independently and alongside GIF providers like Giphy and Tenor. To date, Guggy has been used to build a whopping 2.5 million GIFs across multiple platforms.
