We love these personalized selfie emoji from Google, but there’s a tiny catch

We want to tell the world that we have fallen madly in love with Google’s new personalized selfie emoji, but Google wants to take things slow. If you’re a fan of Bitmoji, you’re going to dig the new caricature feature on Google’s messaging app Allo. It’s objectively better across the board and a breeze to use, with the tiny hiccup that it’s not easy to share. 

Google Allo is an instant messaging mobile app, and its new selfie stickers are created using a selfie/photo of the user.

Cool, eh? How do they do this? Great question. Basically really smart technology. Google is utilizing machine learning and neural networks “to analyze the pixels of an image and algorithmically measure color, shape, or texture.”

So how is this different than Bitmoji?

Bitmoji’s cartoon avatars ask users to select their own features. You can choose your wardrobe, body type, and facial features. But few people have an accurate assessment of their own appearance. The result is stickers that look adorable, but they’re not exactly a spitting image of the user.

In the Allo app, you take a selfie and your sticker is customized within seconds.

Once the app generates your sticker, you can then tweak your face to make minor changes. When you’ve settled on your features, you have 22 custom selfie stickers that look fantastic!

Clearly, Google’s Allo is the champ for selfie stickers then, right?

In appearance, Google takes the cake on personalized stickers. But here’s the bummer: it only works within the Allo messaging app. This differs from Bitmoji, which can be shared through SMS text message, iMessage, and other messaging platforms by installing it into your keyboard. Plus Bitmoji also lets you link to SnapChat. It remains to be seen if Google is being bashful or snobby by being exclusive to this one app. Chances are, Google is using this as an incentive to boost Allo’s users. But hopefully, down the road, they will let users share the selfie stickers across various different platforms through a keyboard app.

Until then, if you have an Android (it’ll be available on IOS soon), it’s worth a download to see this fun cartoon version of yourself.