One improvement might be to use a pronunciation dictionary and map the emojis to actual sounds rather than characters. Having recently needed such a thing, I fo

One improvement might be to use a pronunciation dictionary and map the emojis to actual sounds rather than characters. Having recently needed such a thing, I found that there are two widely available datasets: CMUdict and Moby Pronunciator: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3205 http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?n... https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict The problem is that they'd be pretty hefty payloads to load on the client, so you'd want to do the text -> phone mapping elsewhere. Then use your character mapping as backup for words that aren't in the dictionaries.