The only thing missing from your iMessage stickers … is you!
Price: Free
Version: 1.0.2
Size: 54.7 MB
Developer: Prisma Labs, Inc.
Platform: iPhone
If you’re a big fan of social stickers but wish your face featured in more of them, a free app called Sticky AI could be worth your attention. The application makes it possible for iPhone users to turn selfies into stickers in just a few seconds, and it ships with a number of additional features, too.
Sticky AI, developed by the folks behind the Prisma photo editor, is a simple app but it’s one that works particularly well. Once you’ve installed it on your iPhone handset, the magic happens inside a dedicated application (there is support for the iMessage App Store, mind you – more on this later). In the app, users can take a selfie before Sticky AI intelligently removes the background in your photo. This does work really well, with only a few rare errors cropping up here and there.
You start by taking a selfie – or, if you prefer, by creating a boomerang-style GIF!
After you’ve snapped your selfie and the background has been zapped, users can move their picture around, they can rotate it using two fingers, or they can pinch to increase (or decrease) its size. There’s the option of adding text to the picture, and you can touch the app’s background to change color. Background removal, however, is what sets Sticky AI apart from the competition. Because of this, the end result seems more sticker-like; moreover, unlike Google’s Allo, Sticky AI creates stickers featuring your actual image (rather than a cartoon created in your likeness).
Background removal works incredibly well.
Speed really is the best feature in Sticky AI. Background removal is super fast and surprisingly accurate; the app makes the kind of edit you might be used to seeing in Photoshop automatically, in just a second or two. The text and background edits available are nice additions, but the background removal feature is truly impressive. The end results look great, with Sticky AI creating superb-looking stickers after just a couple of taps.
You can then send your sticker to the Messages app, or you can grab it using Sticky AI’s dedicated iMessage app!
If you’re more of a GIF person, Sticky AI lets users shoot a boomerang-style GIF by holding the capture button when taking their selfie. Background removal once again works brilliantly, although, as you might expect, the processing time is a lot longer when the app is dealing with GIFs.
There’s also plenty of support for third-party messaging applications, including the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Usefully, Sticky AI does support the iMessage App Store, and an iMessage app lets users quickly drop all of their Sticky AI-created stickers into a message thread. This makes it a lot easier to send a selfie-sticker off when the conversation calls for it, though there it’s not possible to actually create selfie-stickers using the iMessage application. To do this, you need the app itself.