Zoobe

About

Zoobe is a voice messaging app for iPhone and Android which allows its users to send and receive audio recorded messages that are dictated by personified animal characters, whose lips move in sync with the voice recording, through short 3D animated video clips. In 2015, Zoobe became a popular tool for creating video messages on the social media site Tumblr, where users would tell absurdly personal or humorous stories through the animated character videos.

History

Zoobe was released in Berlin in 2013 by animator Lenard F. Krawinkel. As of June 2015, more than 160 million messages have been recorded and sent and the app has been downloaded 4 million times.^[1] Techcrunch called the Zoobe characters anthropomorphic nature of the messenger characters featured in the app, Techcrunch has said it “embraced a cartoonish uncanny valley.”^[2]

An early Zoobe commercial

Features

• The app offers more than 80 unique characters, including 15 world-famous faces and other pop culture icons, including Paddington Bear, Om Nom from Cut the Rope, Ryu from Street Fighter®, Maya the Bee™, Vic the Viking™, Angela Merkel, the cute Bunny and other famous avatars including Aunjai, the official mascot of AIS (Thailand’s biggest telecom company).

• The app allows users to customize their video message with an animated background or personal photograph.

• The characters can react accordingly to the user’s mood by analyzing the voice recording.

• Each video message can be sent to another user through private transmission or publicly shared via social media accounts.

Highlights

Usage in Eastern Europe

Zoobe messages have been posted on YouTube since before the app was launched and presumably was still in development, especially from Eastern European countries.^[3] The highest-viewed Zoobe video on YouTube is a Russian one – the title translates as “Zoobe Bunny Wants to go to Dubai” – which was uploaded on October 14th, 2014, and has recieved over 1,17 million views as of July 8th, 2015.

Usage on Tumblr

In late June, 2015, Zoobe videos began appearing on Tumblr more frequently, with the characters saying ironic, absurd or humorous speeches. One of the earliest examples was posted on June 27th by japanese-bird-dad, entitled “DON’T TRY TO CHANGEWHO I AM”.^[4] The post received 601 notes as of July 8th. The single topic blog ZoobeDiaries was created on July 2nd, and since then has reposted 57 individual Zoobe videos as of July 8th.^[5] On July 3rd, popular fan art blogger Kylie Henke created her first Zoobe video, which received 567 notes as of July 8th;^[6] she created several more (compilation below), including one on July 6th entitled “these are basically turning into my video diaries” which received over 171,000 notes in two days.^[7]

On July 8th, Tumblr user Handsomehugs created a series of art of the Zoobe rabbit inspired by videos of Kylie Henke^[7]^[12] and Kurikurimix.^[13] In less than 24 hours, the post managed to gather over 21,000 notes (shown below). Various other artists on Tumblr also created fanart of Henke’s Zoobe videos

As of July 8th, Zoobe is a trending search on Tumblr.^[8] There are over 108,00 results when the term is searched on YouTube, and the word has been tweeted and hashtagged on Instagram over 2,000 times each in the past month.^[9]^[10]^[11]