14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just launched a new feature for Allo app, one that uses a combination of neural networks to transform selfies into personalized stickers. In order to achieve this, Google worked with various artists to make the stickers appealing.
To create a sticker pack, you simply need to snap a selfie and wait for the automatically generated sticker to appear. Then you can use multiple customization options to personalize stickers in various ways, including by changing the type of eyes, haircut, add accessories and more.
The feature is somewhat similar to Google’s Deep Dream technology, and Google created an algorithm that could pick out qualitative features in a way that people do. This move was made to the detriment of a more traditional approach that requires hand coding for interpreting eye color, lighting conditions, and more.
Google is bringing voices to personalized stickers
To create illustrations that resemble Allo users, Google worked with a team of artists and found ways to make stickers recognizable to friends and family. The artists created a set of hairstyles at first and Google trained its neural networks to match the hairstyles and selfies in order to create a selfie that resembles the user. Google also tested the feature among human raters and received feedback over which issues should be remedied, before launching the feature to all users.
Google also avoided a common problem in the field of aesthetics - the uncanny valley, which refers to the fact that human replicas can sometimes feel repulsive. To avoid this, Google aimed towards a lower resolution model for stickers, which allows the team to return an image that doesn’t represent the reality exactly, but allows for more expressiveness.
In addition, Google is working with a range of artistic voices and Allo already received a sarcastic voice in the latest update. More voices and tones will arrive in future updates and the new features will be made available for Allo on iOS as well, not just for Android.
