LINE now has an official Tenor GIF app, meaning users of the LINE chat application will be able to search for and post GIFs right from within LINE chats. The experience shouldn’t be too different from that which is offered to users of Google’s Gboard application, which has an integrated GIF search option thanks to Google‘s acquisition of Tenor, though the GIFs won’t actually be searchable from the keyboard and instead will be in an actual app that opens within LINE. When inside of a LINE chat, users can tap the button that brings up all the things they can share with the other user(s) in the chat, and alongside YouTube, as well as other options like sharing contacts and files, Tenor GIFs will now show up.
While sharing GIFs with a user through LINE chat has been possible prior to this integration the ability to find and share GIFs within LINE has not been, so this marks a first for the application and its users, and it also makes things quicker and easier as there’s no need to leave the app to find a GIF before sharing it with LINE and then choosing the specific chat where the user wants to send it.
At the moment there are only five languages that are supported in the Tenor GIF app in LINE – English, Japanese, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and Indonesian, which should make sense given LINE’s heavy use in Asia and the fact that it’s Japan’s number one chat application. Tenor’s presence on LINE joins the inclusion of the same GIF search option in other chat apps like Facebook’s Messenger, WhatsApp, and Kik, and it opens up users to tons of GIFs that can all be searched for and shared quickly. The arrival of Tenor in LINE should be live for any users of the LINE app as of now, though it doesn’t look to be available in the U.S. at the moment, and it may not be considering the supported languages.
