Moojis Turns Your Selfies Into Personal Emojis

By Yonatan Sredni, NoCamels October 19, 2016 2 minutes

Moojies. Courtesy

Why say you love someone when you could send an emoji blowing heart-shaped kisses, or that you’re dying for pizza when you could send a pizza emoji? At least, that’s what most of the Whatsapp generation seems to think, with emoji increasingly becoming an accepted language.

But one drawback many users experience with emojis are their lack of individuality. Sometimes, there is just no emoji that seems to quite capture the subtlety of what you’re trying to convey. And creating your own personal set of emojis has for the most part been solely the domain of celebrities, like Kim Kardashian’s Kimoji, or Justin Bieber’s Justmoji, to name a few.

Seeking to make the entire emoji experiece more personal, Israeli startup Panimood is setting its sights on changing the face of emojis – quite literally.

Moojis by Panimood, is a new free and fun emoticon keyboard for iPhone and Android that uses your own face to create a cool emoji. The process is simple. Users take pictures of themselves, then the app uses a unique image processing algorithm which takes the user’s selfie, processes it, and re-creates it as a Moojie. The emoji will appear in the Moojis keypad and will be available to share with your friends when you text or message them on any app, including Whatsapp, Facebook, Messenger, iMessage or MMS, using the Moojis keyboard (which can be easily installed through your phone’s settings). The whole process, from selfie to emoji, takes only eight seconds.

The app has eight built-in Moojis, including happy, sad and angry, with additional Moojis available as paid upgrades. Users create a Mooji for each mood, save them and install the keyboard. Moojis are sent as photos, instead of regular emojis, therefore recipients are not required to have the app installed to view the Moojis.

“The market is filled with emoji apps that rank high in the paid apps category,” Shlomi Ben Atar, the company’s CEO told NoCamels. “The problem is they are all keyboards that belong to celebrities (based on their faces), big companies or based on the current standard yellow emojis. Moojis gives users the power to create their own. For the first time ever you’ll be able to express yourself and share your feelings when messaging with your own personal emojis.”

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“Besides the celebrity or brand designated apps, there are a few apps, like Bitmoji, that use databases to create your face (pick eyes, nose, mouth, etc.). But Moojis is the only patented application that creates an emoji which truly represents your face, and can also be used as a platform for additional applications,” Ben Atar said.

Just for fun, the company also creates email signatures (in HTML), based on the Mooji of your choice.

Based in Tel Aviv and founded earlier this year, Moojis has raised an undisclosed amount of funding and currently is the top download in the Israeli App Store.

“Moojis allows you to be creative and make as many of your own personal emojis as you want, using a photo of your real expressions to show your emotions,” Ben Atar said. “Just smile, shoot, and let us do the rest.”