[Feature request] emoji prediction / add fast emoji prediction, via a trigger character

Thanks for the suggestion

SwiftKey already has an emoji prediction, but a little bit different. There is no need to type colon, as long as the setting is on, if you type a keyword, an emoji will show up in the right prediction bar.

But beyond that, given that Telegram is a messaging app, they are able to surface more emoji like this via their own app with the colon command. 

I think there could be something else we may be able to do to show more emoji.

I will share this with the team.

Ryan, thanks for your reply.

Indeed, the advantage of Telegram's "emoji colon-trigger" method is that it shows a list of many possible emoji predictions after typing just a few characters, while SwiftKey only shows a single one emoji prediction.

I'm sure many users would welcome any improvement to SwiftKey which would allow us to more quickly get to the emoji we're looking for. So thanks for considering this.

By the way, it would really help if we could know which word triggers which emoji. For some emoji, the word that predicts it is very easy to guess. But for many other emoji, the trigger word is hard to guess, or there do not seems to be any trigger words. This then forces us to manually scroll through the emoji tables hunting for the one we want.

Therefore, I would be nice if SwiftKey would publish a list with at least one trigger word for each emoji. I have suggested this before, but the reply from SwiftKey was that such a list would not be made available for competitive reasons.

I understand that to a certain extent. Still, we need a much better way to swiftly (pun intended) get to the exact emoji we want. Telegram's way is really great at this, so I hope your product development team will come up with a fast and smooth alternative way of emoji prediction.

Google's Gboard has a "emoji search" feature. This works well in finding multiple emoji which meet the search term, but alas it is a slow way of doing things, with lots of friction: one has to go into a "search" mode, type some characters, pick the right emoji from the search results, leave search mode, then continue typing. So while this method allow finding the exact emoji one is looking for better than SwiftKey does, it is too slow to be very useful. Telegram's way is still much better.

Thanks!

Hi Paul,

I dont think keyboards are able to provide the same functionality as the colon command because we are not a messaging app and don't have the same sort of capabilities.

But I'm not that technical, this is just my best personal guess. Providing better emoji at the right time is something we are keen to improve. 

I will be sure to share this with the team. We did work on an app called Swiftmoji, which you may have really enjoyed - but it has not been worked on much recently.

The key issue here is to get a way to get better and faster emoji prediction.

There are many options:

• select from multiple predicted emoji after typing a trigger + a few characters from the emoji name (Telegram has this)
• search for emoji by typing a search term (Gboard has this)
• define personal shortcuts to emoji (SwiftKey can do this,via clip shortcuts)
• predict emoji based on trigger words (SwiftKey can do this, but only triggers 1 emoji)

Suppose that SwiftKey would implement this new feature:

• type a trigger word to predict an emoji
• 1 predicted emoji appears
• long-press on that emoji
• a vertical pop-up list of different emoji matching the trigger word appears
• tap one of them to select the emoji you want

Could work?

Note: WhatsApp also supports this "emoji colon trigger" in their desktop app, see this article:

• https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/lookup-emojis-whatsapp-keyboard/ 

"The reply from SwiftKey was that such a list would not be made available for competitive reasons."

So... Swiftkey developed a feature that users aren't allowed to know how to use, but competitors can still reverse-engineer with a simple dictionary script... all in the attempt to prevent an industry standard for something as universal as emoji?

Am I getting that right?

Publish the freakin' list.

I also would like to know a list of all the trigger words to predict specific emojis. Please make this available SwiftKey.

Adding my need for a trigger list/trigger key too (: or + like WhatsApp desktop etc), it's a very frequent google search for me, leading me to this thread, and would set your app above lots of others!! The emoji "crystal ball" prediction tab isn't very accurate and also takes the whole sentence into consideration rather than just the last word typed x