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Google's Allo Uses Artificial Intelligence To Create Sticker Illustrations From Selfies

Allo - AI selfie stickers

When chatting with someone, it's really easy to get lost in conversation. For many reasons, that is the fun in instant messaging with the internet available to more people.

Emojis have long been used to create a virtually pleasing response to many everyday conversations. The cartoon avatars can sometimes be the greatest way to express certain feelings, emotions or mood. But when it comes to customization, emojis don't have that luxury.

Bitmoji has created cartoon avatars where users can select features for themselves. From the wardrobe, body type to eyebrows and headgear, all can be customized. But those still leave users to choose what they look like.

In short, that is manual labor. And to some people, they don't like that.

This is where Google steps in. Equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), its Allo messaging app can do all those 'heavy' work for users.

Allo - AI selfie stickers

Inside Allo, users can take a selfie and receive an AI-generated cartoon of themselves within seconds. Users can then customize their face to make some minor changes - in places where the AI has failed. When all is done, users are given a set of 22 custom selfie stickers to choose from.

If compared to Bitmoji, Allo is clearly an advantage due to its automation. Users aren't required to handpick every aspect of their appearance since Allo can do all the work for them. The final results are also more aesthetic.

However, there are two main issues.

The first, is the ability to get the proper lightning conditions. As described by Jennifer Daniel, a creative director working on Allo:

"The traditional computer vision approach to mapping selfies to art would be to analyze the pixels of an image and algorithmically determine attribute values by looking at pixel values to measure color, shape, or texture. However, people today take selfies in all types of lighting conditions and poses. And while people can easily pick out and recognize qualitative features, like eye color, regardless of the lighting condition, this is a very complex task for computers. When people look at eye color, they don’t just interpret the pixel values of blue or green, but take into account the surrounding visual context."

The second issue is probably the most annoying: the feature only works inside Allo as Google is restricting its use and potential to only those users that use the messaging app on a regular basis. For users, this means they can't show those AI-made selfie stickers to anyone, unless they are also Allo users.

Given that Allo is having 10 million users, it is only having a small percentage of the instant messaging market (most are owned by competitors like WhatsApp and Facebook's Messenger). What this means for most people, they can only show-off those stickers with themselves..