Emo

Suggest emoji faster than you can type.

Multilingual on-device emoji suggestion.


Platforms	iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS, Android, Linux, Windows, Browser, Node
Languages	22
Weights	v0.7.0
Demo	https://desertant.com/models/emo/

Type a word or a sentence and get the emoji that fits. Emo is tuned for to-dos, calendar entries, notes, and message drafts across 22 languages (including CJK, Arabic, Thai, Hindi, and more). The model and tokenizer together are small (5MB on Apple via Core ML, 11MB via LiteRT elsewhere) and runs in well under 2ms on device.

"Dentist appointment" → 🦷 · "réserver un vol pour Tokyo" → ✈️ · "犬の散歩" → 🐕 · "จองโรงแรม" → 🏨

Try it

Live demo: desert-ant-labs/emo-demo: type a phrase, get emojis, fully in your browser.

Install

Swift (requirements)

.package(url: "https://github.com/Desert-Ant-Labs/desert-ant-core.git", from: "4.3.0")

Then add the Emo product to your target.

Kotlin (requirements)

implementation("ai.desertant:emo:4.3.0")

JavaScript (requirements)

npm i @desert-ant-labs/emo @litertjs/core   # browser
npm i @desert-ant-labs/emo                  # Node, prebuilt native core

Usage

Create one Emo instance and reuse it. Creating the instance is cheap and doesn't block. The SDK loads the model on first use, or earlier if you call download.

Swift

import Emo

let emo = Emo()
let suggestions = try await emo.suggestions(for: "Pay my bills")
// [EmoSuggestion(emoji: "💰", confidence: ...), ...]

let toned = try await emo.suggestions(for: "go for a run", limit: 1, skinTone: .medium)
// 🏃🏽

Kotlin

suggestions and download are suspending functions. An Emo holds native resources, so close it when you're done, or let use { } close it.

import ai.desertant.emo.Emo
import ai.desertant.emo.EmojiSkinTone

Emo(context).use { emo ->
    val suggestions = emo.suggestions("Pay my bills")               // List<EmoSuggestion>
    val toned = emo.suggestions("go for a run", limit = 1, skinTone = EmojiSkinTone.MEDIUM)
}

JavaScript

The default import is the browser build. For inference in Node, import the /native subpath. The SDK ships /native prebuilt for linux-x64, linux-arm64 and darwin-arm64.

import { Emo } from "@desert-ant-labs/emo";           // browser
// import { Emo } from "@desert-ant-labs/emo/native"; // server-side Node

const emo = await Emo.load();                                // downloads and caches on first use
const suggestions = await emo.suggestions("Pay my bills");   // [{ emoji, confidence }, ...]
emo.dispose();

Loading the model

The SDK downloads the weights from Hugging Face on first use and caches them. To download the weights earlier, for example during onboarding, or to ship them yourself, see model downloads and caching.

let emo = Emo()
if !emo.isDownloaded() {
    try await emo.download { fraction in print("\(Int(fraction * 100))%") }
}

let offline = Emo(directory: myModelDirectory)   // uses the files as they are, downloads nothing

Files

File	Format	Size	Contents
`emo.tflite`	LiteRT / TFLite (int8)	10.2MB	Runs on Android, Linux, Windows, Node, and the web (downloaded on demand by the Kotlin and JavaScript SDKs)
`emo.mlmodelc`	Compiled Core ML	4.6MB	Ready to load on Apple platforms (used by the Swift SDK)
`emo_tokenizer.bin`	Unigram tokenizer	0.75MB	Tokenizer the runtime needs
`emo_meta.json`	JSON	tiny	Emoji labels and runtime config

Older SDK versions load Emo.mlmodelc and emo.safetensors. Those files stay on Hugging Face in revisions v0.6.0 and earlier.

Inputs and outputs

Pass a plain text string. Emo works best on short text that states an intent, like "Pay my bills". Emo gives each of the 812 emoji in its vocabulary a probability. Show the top suggestion, or the top few.

Languages

English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Swedish, Danish, Czech.

Limitations

Emo is tuned for short text that states an intent. Longer text gets noisier suggestions.
Emoji meanings are imprecise. Expect near-ties between the top suggestions.
Quality varies by language. Emo is somewhat weaker on the lower-resource languages in the set.

License

Desert Ant Labs Source-Available License. Free for most apps, and a commercial license is required at scale. Full terms are at the link. Licensing: licensing@desertant.com.

Third-party notices for the weights: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Citation

@software{emo_2026,
  title  = {Emo: Multilingual on-device emoji suggestion},
  author = {Desert Ant Labs},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/desert-ant-labs/emo},
}

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