So, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration. Also, GIFs aren’t actually that new, having been around since the early days of the internet. But in recent years, GIFs have taken on a new life and have become an integral part of our meme driven culture. GIFs allow us to communicate a complex idea quickly and easily with a simple, short animated loop. GIFs are the modern, web version of slang. A familiar GIF can add so much to a conversation because we are so immersed in the web conversation. In addition, they can bring instant emotion, humor, and or energy to what might otherwise be a tame conversation. As GIFs have taken off as a vital part of the way we communicate, a number of tools have cropped up to help us do so. There are numerous GIF keyboards, chatbots, search engines, and other tools that exist to help users add some GIFification to their conversations. What holds a lot of these solutions back, however, is that all they really provide is a quick search or random posting of a GIF. Users can never be sure what they are really trying to communicate with their GIFs. Enter Guggy, a new player in the space that wants to help take GIFs to the next level. How do they do it? They add the text the user searched for on top of the GIF. It sounds simple, but in practice it’s quite powerful. So if the users types, “GIFs are awesome,” they would get a result like this:
Or perhaps you simply what to tell someone how you feel:
One of the keys of Guggy and the GIFs it provides is that you can just write a message as you normally would. Since your text is incorporated into the GIF, it keeps the flow of the conversation going while still adding the fun and playfulness that you would want to achieve with a GIF. The whole experience is enabled by some pretty slick technology. The text is rendered by what Guggy calls “a super fast image rendering server”. This means that it creates your GIF in a flash. It’s also pretty smart in the way it finds GIFs. Tapping into the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the GIFs that Guggy provides feel more connected to the content of your message. When combined with the animated message overly, it provides a powerful effect that other solutions will have a hard time matching. If you’ve used other GIF services such as Giphy, you will notice a difference in the way that Guggy’s GIFs just seem to be more connected to your conversation. The other thing that sets Guggy apart is the way it’s trying to solve the problem of GIFs. It doesn’t want to be just another simple GIF tool, rather the company is aiming to become a robust “GIF provider” and wants its service to be available in as many ways as possible. The current list of platforms Guggy is available on is impressive: iOS, Android, Chrome extension, Slack integration, iMessage App, and others. But perhaps more importantly, it’s also available for 3rd party developers via an API, so theoretically Guggy could end up in any messenger or keyboard, or anywhere else that developers come up with. This is a busy space and Guggy faces a lot of popular competitors. But the simplicity, accuracy, and fun of Guggy make it seriously compelling.
