Meet ‘Genies,’ the lifelike personalized avatars that reenact news
“We plan on making Bitmoji obsolete,” says Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies. Bragging about beating one of the world’s top apps before his has even launched is emblematic of Nigam’s and Genies’ brash style. But with $15 million in funding at a valuation over $100 million, top investors like NEA and Hollywood royalty like CAA are buying into the avatar startup. It already has 680,000 kids waitlisted to sign up for the Genies iOS app that launches today.
"If, God forbid, Donald Trump bombs North Korea, you’ll see your Genie riding a nuke to North Korea,” says Nigam. Whether that idea makes you giggle or roll your eyes, this is Genies’ plan “to be the next BuzzFeed,” the 24-year-old CEO tells me. “Your Genie is the star of the show. The script is whatever happens in the world that day.”
It all starts with customizing your big-headed, photorealistic Genie avatar. While Snapchat-owned Bitmoji look like a comic strip, Genies are closer to Pixar. First you’ll select a personality type that determines some of the scenes you’ll see, based on clouds of brands like Coachella, BuzzFeed and Supreme for cool kids, or TechCrunch and the BBC for techies. Then, using the Genies trait selector wheels, you can quickly scrub through tons of options for a dozen characteristics, like face shape, hair and eyes. Finally, you’ll outfit your Genie in clothes ranging from generic shirts to popular brands.
Genies sends you 10 to 15 animated scenes throughout each day that are around 10 seconds long and feature your avatar. They include quirky little situations for holidays like Christmas, cultural staples like hungover-Sundays and ones based on the top daily news for your personality type. Human editors review the scenes for factual accuracy, coherence and humor, and can tweak them before they’re sent out. Typically, new scenes will arrive quietly in the Genies app, with notifications reserved for huge breaking news or batched digests of updates.
Nigam says Genies taps more than 1 million sources with a focus on reputable news outlets to figure out what’s trending as early as possible. He claims that Genies’ art team and AI have built millions of pre-designed creative assets, and that the AI can actually piece them together to automatically create the animated scenes. If all the blogs are reporting Elon Musk’s plan to colonize mars, then it will cobble together space, stars and Elon himself to show your Genie rocketing to the Red Planet alongside the headline.
You can swipe up to read the top source article for the news. But what Genies really encourages is you messaging the video scenes to friends via other apps like Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger or Snapchat. “Everyone has Giphy, but they use it everywhere else. Exact same thing with us,” Nigam tells me.
The idea is to leverage vanity to make the news seem interesting and shareable, and deliver it through a social app instead of a traditional media publisher. “At our age, we get the majority of our news from Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram.” And for added virality and personalization, many scenes include an empty silhouette you can fill with a celebrity of your choice, like Trump or Kylie Jenner, or insert a friend so you act out the scene with your buddy. If Facebook taught us anything, it’s that people will always open a notification if they get tagged in an image.
Overall, the Genies look great, with much more nuance than you see in alternatives with either fewer customization options or that rely on facial detection. Nigam says he’s not a believer in technologies for automatic avatar generation, saying that even small inaccuracies can be jarring, and testers enjoyed the personalization process. If Genies just released an emoji keyboard with the avatars so you could use them anywhere, it could prove popular.
But the animated scenes are often gimmicky, crass or even offensive. Over a few days of testing, I saw ones advocating for beer bonging, pot brownies, study drugs like Adderall and pouring crappy vodka into Grey Goose bottles to save money. Nigam defended the content, saying these were “party-oriented” for a “young demo where they share and learn through the lens of pop culture.” Others like “Wanted: Holiday Bang Buddy” might be too lewd even for college kids. And one even parodied the important NFL protests of racism and police brutality, featuring students “taking a knee” to get out of a pop quiz. That should never have made it past the human editors.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/genies/
“We plan on making Bitmoji obsolete,” says Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies. Bragging about beating one of the world’s top apps before his has even launched is emblematic of Nigam’s and Genies’ brash style. But with $15 million in funding at a valuation over $100 million, top investors like NEA and Hollywood royalty like CAA are buying into the avatar startup. It already has 680,000 kids waitlisted to sign up for the Genies iOS app that launches today.
"If, God forbid, Donald Trump bombs North Korea, you’ll see your Genie riding a nuke to North Korea,” says Nigam. Whether that idea makes you giggle or roll your eyes, this is Genies’ plan “to be the next BuzzFeed,” the 24-year-old CEO tells me. “Your Genie is the star of the show. The script is whatever happens in the world that day.”
It all starts with customizing your big-headed, photorealistic Genie avatar. While Snapchat-owned Bitmoji look like a comic strip, Genies are closer to Pixar. First you’ll select a personality type that determines some of the scenes you’ll see, based on clouds of brands like Coachella, BuzzFeed and Supreme for cool kids, or TechCrunch and the BBC for techies. Then, using the Genies trait selector wheels, you can quickly scrub through tons of options for a dozen characteristics, like face shape, hair and eyes. Finally, you’ll outfit your Genie in clothes ranging from generic shirts to popular brands.
Genies sends you 10 to 15 animated scenes throughout each day that are around 10 seconds long and feature your avatar. They include quirky little situations for holidays like Christmas, cultural staples like hungover-Sundays and ones based on the top daily news for your personality type. Human editors review the scenes for factual accuracy, coherence and humor, and can tweak them before they’re sent out. Typically, new scenes will arrive quietly in the Genies app, with notifications reserved for huge breaking news or batched digests of updates.
Nigam says Genies taps more than 1 million sources with a focus on reputable news outlets to figure out what’s trending as early as possible. He claims that Genies’ art team and AI have built millions of pre-designed creative assets, and that the AI can actually piece them together to automatically create the animated scenes. If all the blogs are reporting Elon Musk’s plan to colonize mars, then it will cobble together space, stars and Elon himself to show your Genie rocketing to the Red Planet alongside the headline.
You can swipe up to read the top source article for the news. But what Genies really encourages is you messaging the video scenes to friends via other apps like Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger or Snapchat. “Everyone has Giphy, but they use it everywhere else. Exact same thing with us,” Nigam tells me.
The idea is to leverage vanity to make the news seem interesting and shareable, and deliver it through a social app instead of a traditional media publisher. “At our age, we get the majority of our news from Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram.” And for added virality and personalization, many scenes include an empty silhouette you can fill with a celebrity of your choice, like Trump or Kylie Jenner, or insert a friend so you act out the scene with your buddy. If Facebook taught us anything, it’s that people will always open a notification if they get tagged in an image.
Overall, the Genies look great, with much more nuance than you see in alternatives with either fewer customization options or that rely on facial detection. Nigam says he’s not a believer in technologies for automatic avatar generation, saying that even small inaccuracies can be jarring, and testers enjoyed the personalization process. If Genies just released an emoji keyboard with the avatars so you could use them anywhere, it could prove popular.
But the animated scenes are often gimmicky, crass or even offensive. Over a few days of testing, I saw ones advocating for beer bonging, pot brownies, study drugs like Adderall and pouring crappy vodka into Grey Goose bottles to save money. Nigam defended the content, saying these were “party-oriented” for a “young demo where they share and learn through the lens of pop culture.” Others like “Wanted: Holiday Bang Buddy” might be too lewd even for college kids. And one even parodied the important NFL protests of racism and police brutality, featuring students “taking a knee” to get out of a pop quiz. That should never have made it past the human editors.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/genies/
