Schlagwort: chat

  • Polishing up emoji and making them easier to sharePolishing up emoji and making them easier to shareCreative Director

    Polishing up emoji and making them easier to sharePolishing up emoji and making them easier to shareCreative Director

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    We talk a lot about the most frequently used emoji — 😂, 😭,❤️… But what about 📬? Who will speak for 📓? With over 3,521 emoji, there are a lot you have to scroll past to get to 👑. While working from home, plus the delay of Unicode’s next emoji release, we had some time to reflect and answer last year’s seemingly rhetorical question: What does World Emoji Day look like without new emoji?

    Well, it looks like giving some love to hundreds of emoji already on your keyboard — focusing on making them more universal, accessible and authentic — so that you can find an all-new fav emoji (I’m fond of 🎷🐛). And, you can find all of these emoji (yes, including the king, 🐢) across more of Google’s platforms including Android, Gmail, Chat, Chrome OS and YouTube.

    Emoji for everyone

    Emoji have a global audience and it’s important for them to be globally relevant. Pie emoji is a curious one — it previously looked like a very specific American pumpkin pie (a family favorite!). Now it’s something everyone recognizes. I could crack a joke about how there’s more food to go around but it’s not really a joke: This minor change means this one emoji can represent a whole host of pies — apple pie, blueberry pie, strawberry pie, cherry pie, chicken pot pie, beef and mushroom…the list goes on.

    Animation of pie emoji changing from a slice o a whole pie

    Have you ever wondered why an emoji looks the way it does? Like, the bikini emoji 👙 — does it really need an invisible ghost wearing it? Now, any body is a bikini body.

    Animation of bikini emoji changing to new design

    Other emoji changes are long overdue. This year has been eye-opening, and now, so is the face mask emoji 😷. This emoji originated in Japan, where people regularly wear masks even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, masking is a universal way of showing kindness to others.

    Animation of mask emoji opening it's eyes and blinking

    Emoji you can’t miss

    When designing emoji, you often have to exaggerate sizes. Our transportation emoji are now easier to see since the new designs allow them to take advantage of the small space they occupy.

    Animation of emoji cars changing to their new design

    Emoji that get the job done

    However, sometimes deviating too far from reality means an emoji comes along and taunts you, haunting your dreams. Oh, that doesn’t happen to you? Just me? Well, when I close my eyes I see the scissors emoji (✂️). I know it’s just an emoji and doesn’t need to be able to actually cut things…but the new one can!

    Animation of scissors emoji changing to new design and closing blades

    One of the perks of the job is that I get to learn all kinds of things — like the history of accordion design 🪗, the anatomy of an octopus, how parachutes work! As someone who never learned to drive, it took designing emoji to learn that the yellow painted lines on the road tell you to stay on the right of the yellow line. But, how can you stay on the right of the yellow line if the road is flanked by yellow lines? Well, our new design for motorway 🛣️ will pass its next driving exam.

    Animation of motorway changing to new design

    Other emoji just needed to be cooked a bit longer 🍳 (or in some cases, dropped in the fryer).

    Animation of food emoji (croissant, rice, bacon, tampura) changing to new designs

    Emoji that keep you company at night

    If you look close enough, you might also notice a few additions when you switch over to dark theme in a few of the new designs.

    Animation of camping emoji changing to dark them with new stars

    Emoji that show up in more places than ever before

    Android 12 will include all of these emoji when it rolls out this fall 🍁📲. And to make it easier for everyone to see emoji 🧚 no matter how old your phone is or when your favorite messaging app updates, starting with Android 12, all apps that support Appcompat will automagically get the latest and greatest emoji 📣. Now developers don’t have to write code to display cute baby seals 🦭🦭🦭.

    Can’t wait until the fall? Beginning this month, you will be able to send 📨 and receive 📩 emoji in Gmail and Chat without fear they will appear broken 💔. Have a Chromebook 💻 ? We’ve got you covered ☔ with a shiny new emoji picker coming this month. Watching your favorite creator on YouTube and chatting in the live Chat 🎮 ? Send as many 🥺 emoji as you like later this year.

    Website: LINK

  • Analyzing Twitch chat during a Pokémon Marathon

    Analyzing Twitch chat during a Pokémon Marathon

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    We dove into Twitch chat during the Pokémon Marathon, and found key moments when viewers sing, cry, and laugh together. Sometimes, weirdly, all three happen at the same time.

    Context and dataset

    Twitch ran a marathon of all Pokémon episodes and movies. The first 13 episodes aired on August 27, from 10am to 4pm PST. While watching Pokémon, we noticed a lot of meming and spamming in chat, even by Twitch standards. So we decided to dive into it.

    Our dataset has two tables. One consists of all 269k messages posted by viewers during these 6 hours. The messages are lowercased for convenience. The second table consists of emotes usage, it’s also indexed on message id, and has one row per emote use.

    Twitch chat likes emotes: 61% of chat messages have at least one. Twitch chat also likes to spam emotes: a total of 359k emotes were used, i.e. chatters use on average 2 per message with an emote.

    Gotta Catch ’Em All

    Each of the 13 episodes opens and concludes with the Pokémon theme song, “Pokémon, gotta catch ’em all”. It is a catchy song written in common meter with classic anime lyrics. Its most frequent non-stopword token is “pokemon”, appearing in 14 out of the 45 lines of the theme song.

    Throughout all 13 episodes, viewers sing along in chat to the theme song, during both the intro and outro. While the average 10-second window during the marathon sees 1.5% of chat messages with the token “pokemon”, this can reach up to 18% during the theme song.

    The graph below shows a heartbeat-like pattern in the proportion of chat messages with the “pokemon” token. Since each episode is 22 minutes, and intermissions between episodes 4 minutes, this proportion spikes twice every 26 minutes.

    The proportion of chat messages with the “pokemon” token spikes when the theme song plays.

    Text memes: “never seen again” and “pity badge”

    Throughout his adventures, protagonist Ash encounters various characters whom he leaves but promises to see again. Twitch chat, in disbelief, spams “never seen again”. This goodbye meme started modestly in episode 4, peaked at episode 8 at 17% of chat messages in a 10s window, and dwindled in the following episodes played that day.

    However, another raw-text meme stayed strong after episode 7. When Ash challenges the three Cerulean Gym leaders, they tell him their Pokémon are exhausted and forfeit their Cascade badge to him without a fight. This prompted chat to spam “pity badge”. This meme peaked at 25% of chat messages during episode 13, when Ash showed his badges proudly.

    The proportion of chat messages like “never seen again” and “pity badge” spike at different moments.

    Viewers love these text memes.

    LDA topics

    We’d like to explore trends involving both emotes and raw text throughout the day. Moreover, in Pokémon, the scenario moves quickly: one minute is slapstick running-around, with chat laughing, and the next tearful melodrama, with chat crying. LDA seems appropriate.

    We first remove stop words (“the”, “is”, “are”, etc.), then treat each minute of chat as a document for LDA. LDA then treats each minute of chat as a mixture of topics, and outputs the top words for these topics. A topic is an assignment of a weight to each word, for example {‘pokemon’:0.9, ‘sourpls’:0.8, …}. All words appear in all topics, but the topic’s top words enable us humans to interpret it. We played around with the number of topics, and ended at 11, a local minimum. The resulting topics are displayed below.

    Let’s deep dive into 2 of these topics: the sad topic, and the Team Rocket topic.

    The sad topic

    The BibleThump emote

    Topic 9 is about the sad moments in Pokémon. It loads heavily on tokens like “biblethump”, which is a tearful Twitch emote expressing commiseration, sometimes used sarcastically. It also loads heavily on words related to the Pokémon Charmander.

    Topic 9 covers the sad moments in Pokémon.

    We believe that words related to Charmander are prominent in topic 9 because of episode 11, in which Ash meets Charmander, and a very sad and melodramatic story unfolds. Chat was ready to react. Here’s a close-up of episode 11’s BibleThump-ness.

    While the episode is very melodramatic in the beginning, it quickly turns around, and chat spams PogChamp, an emote indicating amazement.

    These flip-flopping emotions remind us of the 6 shapes of story arcs. In our case, Twitch chat lets us analyze these story arcs via the audience’s reactions.

    The Team Rocket topic

    The top words in Topic 10 come from the Team Rocket motto!!

    Prepare for Trouble
    Make it double
    To protect the world from devastation
    To unite all people within our nation
    To denounce the evils of truth and love
    To extend our reach to the stars above
    Jessie
    James
    Team Rocket Blast off at the speed of light
    Surrender now or prepare to fight
    Meowth, that’s Right!

    Starting with the Team Rocket’s first appearance in episode 2, and every time they appear thereafter, chat just spams the villains’ motto.

    Topic 10 tracks with Team Rocket appearances.

    Wrapping up

    This article dove into chat during the first day of the Pokémon marathon on Twitch. Pokémon brought viewers together in chat, via memes involving raw text, emotes, or both. LDA helped us discover that the most intense memes stem from silly plot elements, melodramatic moments, and catchy theme songs and mottos.

    This article was co-written by Thomas Debeauvais, Sanjay Kairam, and Brendan Rocks.

    Website: LINK