Emoji have gone from a weird, insular Japanese thing to a global phenomenon. Remember how upset everyone was when we didn't have that taco emoji? Now SwiftKey is looking to improve everyone's emoji game with Swiftmoji, a keyboard with predictive emoji. This is a giant leap for mankind.

The basics of Swiftmoji are much the same as the main SwiftKey. You get regular text suggestions, there's swipe input, and you can personalize with your account info. What makes it distinct is the emoji bar, which sits just above the keyboard's regular suggestion bar. As you type, it uses context to guess at which emoji make the most sense. For example, start talking about taking a vacation, and you get planes, palm trees, and so on.

The emoji bar can be undocked from the keyboard and dragged around wherever you want. The chain of icons float along a bit like Facebook chat heads. You can simply drag the floating bar back to the keyboard to re-dock. Want to give it a shot? You'll have to join the beta before the link below will work. You can also get it on APK Mirror. It's not clear if this app will go on to become its own product, but I'd wager on its features being merged into SwiftKey eventually.

UPDATE: 2016/07/21 8:41am PDT BY

Swiftmoji is now out of beta and ready for download on the Play Store at the link below without joining a beta first.