human
What is the history of the emoji?
assistant
The emoji was first introduced in Japan in the late 1980s. It was originally designed to be used as a replacement for text characters, such as punctuation marks and numbers. In the early 1990s, it began to gain popularity outside Japan and eventually became part of Unicode in 1999. Since then, the emoji has become an important part of modern communication, with over 1,500 different emojis now available.