Emojis are hugely popular, with nearly a third of smartphone owners using them several times a day. But the setup for choosing which visual icon to use is pretty basic — texters browse a menu of up to nearly 2000 emojis, organized around themes. Now, Dango is an AI app for Android users, which makes suggestions while they are typing, based on the content of their conversation.

Dango, created by Whirlscape, is an emoji assistant. To begin, users download the free app and allow it access to messaging apps such as Facebook messenger, Twitter and Snapchat. Then Dango appears as a floating pop-up offering suggestions of emojis, stickers and gifs as the user types. The app uses deep learning and data, which the creators gathered by scanning posts on Twitter, reddit and Instagram. This enables Dango to understand the language of emoji and the related slang, so that it can make truly intuitive suggestions. At a basic level, for example, users type about being hungry and Dango will offer up food-related emoji like the pizza or sushi icons. More impressively, type Beyonce and Dango will suggest a crown and a bumblebee, because she is known as Queen B.

How could tools like Dango be used to help communication in the future?