Telegram Improves User Experience With New Video Stickers, Animated Reactions and More

Telegram Messenger has launched multiple new features in its latest update which includes easy-to-make video stickers, better reactions with compact animations and extra emoji, a button to review unseen reactions and improved navigation between chats. The updates are targeted towards improving the user experience and giving them more options to express themselves on the platform.

Video Sticker

With an unmatched quality and efficiency, the stickers introduced by Telegram support for converting stickers from regular videos. Since creating such stickers requires experience and specialized software, the support from Telegram gives the flexibility to the consumers for creating their own pack or add new sets made by others. Further developers can use the Sticker Import API to build powerful apps for creating and importing stickers to Telegram.

Better Reaction and Interactive Emoji

Telegram has made reactions better by giving them the shape of compact animations. The interactive emojis are now synchronized, and the recipients will see the animations in real time. The update has also added 5 new reactions can also be accessed via full screen effect.

Navigating Recent Chats

The consumers can now hold the 'Back' button to return to a specific chat. Further, consumers can easily navigate through chats through opening chats from forwarded messages, links, usernames, profiles, etc.

Bug Busting and More

The new update also brings improved call quality, added support for translation to Instant View pages (and bios on iOS), and the option to send silent messages from the sharing menu. The iOS version also has new animations which can be explored by tapping icons in the tab bar.

For more information, please visit to Telegram’s latest blog:
https://telegram.org/blog/video-stickers-better-reactions

Pavel Durov’s Blog:
https://t.me/durov

Facebook announces artificial intelligence system DeepText

Thursday saw Social Networking giant Facebook making a significant announcement. The California based company shared its plans of developing 'DeepText', a new artificial intelligence (AI) system.

The initial information made available by the company revealed that the AI will have the ability to analyse what people are writing about in the Facebook posts with an accuracy that is almost near-human. In addition to this, it will be able to achieve this in across 20 languages.

According to a statement shared by Facebook with a technology website, if the AI is able to automatically pick out hate speech from Facebook status updates that merely contain controversial terms, it would help prevent a Facebook user from ever suffering the harassment and going the process of reporting it manually.

Facebook strongly believes the technology needs to be developed up to a level that computers are able to understand things like word-sense disambiguation and slangs etc. as this will help them get closer to how humans comprehend text.

Facebook has already started testing the DeepText on its Facebook Messenger and has got very promising results. According the networking giant, the AI systems have successfully reported more offensive photos than humans on its networking site.

According to Facebook, with DeepText its aim is to make optimum use of its ability to make better recommendations to Facebook users, both about related posts and related services one can avail on the network and improve its overall user experience.

For example, if the AI recognizes in a sentence that the user is in need of a taxi ride, it will suggest them to make use of Messenger's transportation integrations with services such as Lyft and Uber.

Just when you think our Facebook experience can't get any better, the networking giant comes out with something new and innovative.

[Top Image Credits: Michael Short — Bloomberg via Getty Images]