Pixit Is a Messenger App That Predicts the GIFs You’ll Want to Send as You Type
Services like Google Hangouts and Apple iMessage have long offered options to send GIFs in conversations, which we love. But with those apps, we’re forced to scour the Internet for the proper GIFs ourselves, and then upload them, which turns into a pain-in-the-neck process when you’re in the middle of chatting.
That’s why we’re so excited about Pixit, a new GIF messenger app that suggests GIFs you can use in your messages as you type, based on the words you’re using.
It’s a free messaging app, like GroupMe, Line, or Kik, and a dream come true for GIF lovers everywhere.
The app provides a selection of relevant GIFs to include in your messages, choices that are informed by whatever it is that you’re typing. The GIFs appear in small tile format above your keyboard and switch up as you complete each new word.
You can also tap any word or words that you’ve typed if you want to get a more precise selection of GIFs to choose from, based on a specific word.
The app features a diverse library of delightful GIFs uploaded by the Pixit team. The makers of Pixit have told Yahoo Tech that the ability to upload your own GIFs will come sometime in the future.
With Pixit, you can chat one on one or in groups. We feared that the latter option would give this app the potential to feast on our smartphones’ monthly mobile plans. But the Pixit team assures us that moderate chatters shouldn’t be worried about the app sucking too much of their data.
“[We] did a ton of work to minimize the amount of data transferred,” Pixit told us. “This work also helped us make the experience snap-fast. … Unless you are on a GIF-chatting rampage, an average data plan should handle the app just fine.”
Just like WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and others, Pixit doesn’t use actual SMS to send messages, so those without text messaging on your mobile plans will be good to go.
As a chat client going up against the likes of GroupMe and WhatsApp, Pixit is still quite underdeveloped; it’s only a week or so old. There are no “now typing” notifications, nor a Web version, nor the ability to delete message threads. You can’t send a Pixit message to someone without the app.
In speaking with Yahoo Tech, the Pixit team told us that it has “literally a hundred items” on its list of features to pepper in, so expect some updates soon.
If for some reason you’re opposed to all this animation but still want something more fun than plain text, perhaps waiting for Emojli, the forthcoming emoji-only messenger, is a better option. That app is set to launch any day now, according to its creators’ Twitter feed.
For everyone else, Pixit is available now for free on Android and iOS. So don’t just stand there sending a boring text message. Get moving!
Have questions, comments, or just want to tell me something funny? Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com.
