“These emojis include a sloth, falafels, otter, Diya lamp for Diwali celebrations, garlic, waffles, service dogs, an orangutan, a skunk and more”

Google announced that it would introduce 65 new emoji to Android as part of World Emoji Day. These emojis include a sloth, falafels, otter, Diya lamp for Diwali celebrations, garlic, waffles, service dogs, an orangutan, and a skunk. The Mountain View giant says that it also included 53 gender-ambiguous emojis, meaning users can tap-and-hold from the keyboard to select male and female variants. Lastly, the company also mentioned it’s also bringing 71 multi-skin-toned couples to the latest pack. All these new and tweaked emojis will be made available with Android Q in September and are a part of Emoji 12.0 as approved by the Unicode Consortium.

Google, in a statement, said, “For example, the emoji for ‘police officer’ is commonly shown as male and ‘person getting a haircut’ is female, which can reinforce gender stereotypes. With this update, emoji with no gender specified will default to a gender-ambiguous design on Android—but you can still choose between male and female presentations if want to opt into a gender.”

Separately, the recently released Google Chrome 77 Canary brought an improved dark mode to the web. Before this change, colours on some websites would be inverted, and this made specific images turn to white or would not show up on the page. The latest Canary version improves the dark mode feature on websites as it brings proper dark elements that were surprisingly missing in the previous versions.