It’s actually not _predicting_ what emoji you want. There’s aliases assigned to each emoji and you are presented with the options based on the last word you typ

It’s actually not _predicting_ what emoji you want. There’s aliases assigned to each emoji and you are presented with the options based on the last word you typed. You might know this already, but how Apple has coded it is it’ll replace the last word with an emoji unless you put a trailing space. But if you put down a space first it’ll add the emoji. So in your examples you would write “I hope tomorrow is sunny pray” and choose the emoji and it will be “I hope tomorrow is sunny :pray:”