Emojis are a funny evolution of the emoticons of yesteryear, but there are only so many people to choose. Although a handful of news is added each year, for the most part, what you see is what you get is why “Emoji Kitchen” of Android is so great.
The functionality allows you to combine two emojis to create a whole new one, directly on your device. If you want to send a Winky face, but with the robot emoji, you can. You can make the skull of laughter, or transform a piece of pizza into a rocket. The functionality multiplies a limited but considerable pool of Emoji choice in an amazing number of varieties.
Although Emoji Kitchen is now automatically included on Pixel devices, it does not even exist on iPhone, at least from the latest official software version, iOS 18.5. With iOS 26, currently in beta, however, Apple has built an emoji kitchen functionality which uses Apple Intelligence to mix several emoji or genmoji together to make a new icon.
The functionality did not draw as much attention as others during the WWDC Keynote presenting iOS 26, but this seems to be a funny use of Apple AI.
How to mix emoji and genmoji on iOS 26
Credit: Apple / Youtube
In order to try this, you will have to run iOS 26 on an iPhone compatible with Apple Intelligence (that is to say an iPhone 15 pro or more recent), although the beta version is always in its first steps, I do not recommend you try it at this time.
What do you think so far?
Once you run iOS 26, open the Emoji keyboard, then press “Genmoji”. Here, you will now see a new “Suggestions” section, which offers a row of emojis from which you can choose. If you do not like these suggestions, you can choose “show more” to see different categories of emojis, including “themes”, “expressions”, “costumes”, “accessories” and “places”. As Emojipedia points out, these categories have icons that are not standard emojis, such as a racing car helmet and a crown of flowers.
If you are looking to mix specific emojis, however, simply press the Gray icon “Smiley +”. This button will open the Emoji keyboard, so that you can choose the options you like, in addition to all the prompts based on the text you want to add. You can add up to six “concepts” (emojis and prompts) per generation, so that you can really mix things, although you can see that the use of fewer prompts returns results closer to your planned design.
From there, Genmoji will start to generate new emojis from your selection, and you can scroll the different options it presents. Although the application hides emojis and invites here, you can press the image to see which concepts it was generated. If you like a generation, press the check mark and Genmoji will automatically enter it in the text field to share.
