New Google Allo feature turns selfies into animated cartoon stickers

A new feature for Google Allo has started rolling out today, allowing Android users to turn their selfies into personalized cartoon stickers.

According to the Google Blog, simply snapping a selfie in the smart messaging app will automatically generate an illustrated version of the user. Options to customize appearances in areas like hair colour, eye shape and glasses are also offered.

In the research blog post, Google says it had to take many steps with machine learning and neural networks to map facial features properly. This helped avoid the uncanny valley effect, where human replicas appear eerily close, but not identical, to actual humans. Ensuring representation for all races, genders and ages was said to be a challenge as well.

Animated illustrations for the selfie-to-sticker feature were designed by Lamar Abrams, storyboard artist on the popular animated series Steven Universe.

Earlier this week, Google Allo also received new functionality in the form of French support for Assistant.

The update is now available for Google Allo Android, with an iOS version to “come soon.”

Source: Google Blog