It works like this: Whenever you want to spice up your conversation, you click on the Guggy button and get a selection of GIFs with your text in them. If you find one that you like and that you think is funny, you click it and a link gets copied to your clipboard.
When we started Guggy, we were trying to provide non-technical users with an easy way of creating funny GIFs, and for that we built a GIF editor, only to discover that the real problem was that people had a hard time combining the right text with the right GIF. That got us thinking that we should try to automatically create the text/image pairing, relieving users from the need to search and match. To do that, we've built an NLP engine that understands 'messaging language', that is, slang, excited writing (e.g. “soo amazinggg!”) and leetspeak, to name a few.
We’ve also built a fast image rendering engine that generates the final media for the user in real time. This stands out from existing solutions, which rely on existing media files (served via CDNs). We don’t store the files at all, we generate them on the fly at each request. That gives us flexibility in personalizing the content to the user.
We’re two co-founders who are also cousins. We have been working together on numerous projects for several years, and always wanted to build something related to humor. Of all the projects we've tried, this is the one that just sort of took off, and we've been following where the users want to take us. It's kind of a dream project because the technical challenges are interesting and we get to work in a space that amuses us.
Here is a real example from our users of how a regular message can become expressive and engaging using Guggy - https://img.guggy.com/media/iL1rqhoZE7/animated/2/h/guggy.gi...
We offer our own Android/iOS GIF keyboards for natural experience, or you can just use our standalone apps. We also have bots and an API so you can use Guggy via messengers such as Facebook and Slack.
I've heard that this place can be a bit serious! but if you don't find it annoying, we may reply to bits of your text in the comments with Guggy URLs, just for fun and to show what the system can do.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our product, and feel free to head to guggy.com and reply with Guggy GIFs :)
by Andrey
Azimov
