Google Phone’s bizarre ‘Audio emoji’ reactions have started rolling out

Ever since the first emoticons reared their text-based heads on the early message boards of the internet, they have been slowly infiltrating our means of communication. What was originally a simple string of ASCII text morphed into the first 90 emoji put on the J-Phone back in 1997. By the time emoji were officially incorporated into Unicode in 2010, the number had ballooned to nearly 1000. Today, that number stands at over 3,500 emoji and it’s growing every year. As if that wasn’t enough, now you have to prepare yourself for audio emoji.

We’ve known that the Google Phone app was getting audio emoji since February, and now they’re here (via 9to5Google and Google News). The update which enables these emoji is only available to users enrolled in the beta program for the app (which is currently full), so this isn’t a full rollout, yet. For users that do have the audio emoji, they will be able to choose between six sounds:

To use Google’s new fart button, you can just push the button over the regular Phone interface buttons in the app. You’ll even get an accompanying animation, so it seems like this is a feature meant to be used on speaker phone. Alternatively, if you don’t want to be tempted by the intoxicating pleasure of bombarding your next conference call with a drumroll leading into a fart and finishing with applause, you can turn the new emoji off via the settings menu.

The internet seems fairly united in its disdain for this new feature, and on the face of it, it’s pretty silly. But despite universal cries of “Why are you wasting your time on this?” I think this is an idea that is long overdue. Yes, Android has some issues that are probably more “important” than this one, but if ever a project had “20% Time” written on it, it’s this one. I doubt Google pushed back the release of a security update to satisfy its sonic whimsy.

As fun as this little update is, however, I still think it misses the mark. As much as my inner Beavis loves the idea of a fart button on my phone, I would much rather have the option to customize my sounds. I want that obscure clip from Frasier that’s become an in-joke with my family. I want a soundboard full of the best of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The new Google audio emoji aren’t a failure because they go too far, they’re a failure because they don’t go far enough.