Giphy Says Is the Coolest Thing Ever to Happen to GIFs

GIFs have become synonymous with pop culture as messaging apps and social networks have grown rapidly over the last few years. No matter which social network you use, you’re more than likely to find GIFs from popular TV shows and movies.

Making GIFs has also become easier than ever. There are several awesome apps that let you do this, including Giphy Says. Giphy is one of the world’s most popular stashes of GIFs on the Internet. Its new app is exclusive to the iPhone for the time being, and lets you capture short clips, while automatically adding subtitles. Just point the camera anywhere and talk for a few seconds. When you are done, you’ll see your words plastered on the video.

This is perhaps the coolest thing to happen to GIFs since, well, the rise of cute GIFs of puppies and kittens. The idea is quite simple and has been executed very well. Giphy Says uses Apple’s Siri voice recognition tech to convert what you say into text and that works surprisingly well most of the time.

We tried this in a quiet room and Giphy Says managed to catch most of what we were trying to say. Some of the words it did not understand, such as “pulao” can easily be attributed to Siri’s unfamiliarity with Indian words. It picked up the correct phrase about nine of ten times, which is pretty good.

Giphy Says is a good example of an app that does just one thing and does it very well. It’s just like using a camera app with filters. You can swipe either side to reveal these “filters”, which are simply different effects to the text. You can have text plastered all over the screen or in a callout, like the dialogue in a comic strip. There’s even one filter that turns everything you say into emoji, which is by far our favourite filter.

Once you’re done, you can easily share these GIFs via iMessage, FB Messenger, or post them to Instagram. Alternatively you can save these GIFs to your photo library, or just hit the share button to send them to practically any app.

The experience overall is quite smooth and should present no problems to beginners. Just remember that GIFs, in general, aren’t as high-quality as videos you’d normally shoot on your phone.

The only thing it lacks is an Android version, but we’d assume that the developers will eventually ship one. It’s not often that we come across slick apps that do what they promise extremely well straight out of the box. Giphy Says is one of the few apps to manage this and we’d be very happy to recommend it to everyone.

You can download Giphy Says free from the App Store.