Tech of The Day: Now You Can Search YouTube Videos Using Emoji

Now you can have your emoji and YouTube it, too!

Researchers at University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm Research have created an emoji search engine that lets you use the tiny pictures to search through thousands of YouTube videos.

The prototype, called Emoji2Video, has a a curated list of 385 emoji users can select to search through a database of 45,000 YouTube videos

MIT Technology Review explains how the technology works:

The researchers used deep-learning techniques to produce emoji labels for videos that seem to appropriately represent what's in them (a baseball or a dog, for instance) and to determine how likely it is that those things are in a given frame. About one out of every 50 frames was analyzed, Cappallo says, and the emojis chosen to represent those are averaged to get one short emoji list, ordered in decreasing confidence, for that particular video.

Researchers hope this technology could be used for bridging language gaps.

It still obviously needs some work. A quick search using the eggplant emoji gives you this video on how to make an eggplant sandwich.

Because we all know what the eggplant really means.