When Apple launched the iPhone X, it included facial recognition technology that allowed users to unlock the phone just by looking at it.
At the end of the presentation senior vice president Philip Schiller showed off another feature: Animoji — animated emojis that could move and speak, potentially changing the way people send messages to each other.
For the $1,000 phone, the animjois were a nice and admittedly a little gimmicky draw. Utilizing over 50 muscles of recognition to map a person's face, the animojis appeared in dozens of animal faces. Apple doubled down on the feature and upgraded it to a "Memoji," allowing users to customize the animoji.
Despite the novelty and the attempt to keep the feature fresh, not everyone has taken to it the way Apple might have hoped. Right after they were announced, TechCrunch decried the feature and pointed out numerous issues with it, including the need to listen to messages rather than read them. Others, like Slate, were quick to latch onto the dangers of putting facial recognition tech into the public, especially as a fad to spread it faster.
Perhaps the most telling sign the feature hasn't taken off yet is that two years on, people are still publishing articles asking "what are animoji?"