Microsoft Teams is adding a Slack-favorite emoji feature

Microsoft is adding a new feature to its Teams communications platform that enables users to upload their own custom emoji to use in reactions and messages. Announced during its Build developer conference on Tuesday, Microsoft says the new custom emoji will be available to try next month via the Teams public preview, with the goal of helping Teams users collaborate and express themselves “more creatively and authentically.”

IT admins for businesses that use Teams will have the ability to limit which users can upload or delete custom emoji, or they can turn the feature off entirely. Once custom emoji are uploaded into Teams, they’ll only be visible within the same organization domain. Microsoft says that general availability for custom emoji is expected sometime this July.

The announcement comes three months after Microsoft employees discovered an early version of the feature on an internal Teams build, finding an animated emoji of the widely memed Pepe the Frog character in some reactions and messages. Currently, Microsoft Teams only supports official Unicode emoji — the standardized array of public domain emoji supported by most smartphones and social media platforms.

In contrast to other communications platforms, Microsoft is very late to the custom emoji party. It’s been a prominent feature on Slack and Discord for years already, while Google Chat rolled out a similar feature for Workspace users back in 2022.