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There’s an emoji for that: meet Genmoji, the Apple Intelligence-powered emoji creation feature

Apple likes to call Apple Intelligence ‘AI for the rest of us.’ By giving AI features to its massive base of existing iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, the company has the unique opportunity to make AI mainstream. One Apple Intelligence feature coming later this year—but not yet available in the iOS 18.1 beta—is Genmoji. Genmoji let you use AI to create emoji for any occasion.

Here’s a look at what may prove to be the most popular Apple Intelligence feature.

Create an emoji for any occasion with AI Genmoji

AI Genmoji

Despite the growing array of emoji included in iOS each year, we’ve all surely run into that occasion when we wanted an emoji for something, only to find it didn’t exist.

Apple has made that a problem of the past thanks to iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence.

Genmoji is an AI-powered feature that enables you to have new emoji created for your use. All you have to do is type in what you’re looking for, and your iPhone will present you with a newly-created emoji for your use.

Since emoji are actually unicode characters that work cross-platform, Apple’s Genmoji won’t technically work the same way as other emoji. If they did, they wouldn’t display properly on non-Apple devices.

Instead, Apple creates new AI Genmoji as images. This won’t make much difference to users, but it’s a technical detail worth noting.

In practice though, Genmoji will apparently just like the other emoji available on your device.

Genmoji will be great for expressing a variety of emotions and objects that emoji don’t quite cover right now. Personally, I’ll be making an iPad emoji first.

What emoji do you plan to create using Genmoji? Let us know in the comments.

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Avatar for Ryan Christoffel Ryan Christoffel

Ryan got his start in journalism as an Editor at MacStories, where he worked for four years covering Apple news, writing app reviews, and more. For two years he co-hosted the Adapt podcast on Relay FM, which focused entirely on the iPad. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his favorite Apple device is the iPad Pro.

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