[derefr]

Extremely neat, but I really don't understand the point of the app (Dango) that all this engineering is for the sake of. If I'm using an emoji, it's either instead of words, or to clarify words that could be taken multiple ways (e.g. sarcasm.)

Who are these people that type a sentence (with a single meaning, clear-cut enough for Dango to detect), and then want to add a redundant pictorial representation of the same words they just typed?

[wxs]

Yeah so this is a legitimate concern. Of course sometimes it's fun to say "let's eat pizza :pizza_emoji:", but that's not hugely valuable.

However, Dango's training data includes people using Emoji to augment rather than repeat their sentence. So if there are two different interpretations and an emoji could disambiguate, the ideal is that Dango has seen people use that phrase both ways and, and that it suggests both possibilities and you can pick the one that you meant. In many cases this works now, in many cases we still have work to do.

It also suggests based on messages sent to you, so if there are a couple different replies it can show you them all (although this feature still needs work).