Hike Messenger adds stories, camera and live filters

India’s home grown messaging platform and Kavin Bharti Mittal-owned Hike Messenger has rolled out new features — Stories, Camera and Live Filters. Now, stories will be a new way for Hike users to share their lives and real moments with their friends through photos and videos. A user who posts a story can see how many people and who all viewed that particular story.

Hike has also launched its own camera built into the app making it extremely quick and easy for people to snap photos right inside of Hike. In addition to that, it announced “Live filters”, a new feature that uses Hike’s new camera to automatically detect and recognize a user’s face using Machine Learning and allows people to very easily decorate their faces in photos.

Hike has 12 Live filters available at launch, ranging from a cool Black and White Sunglasses, to a Turban and a Mustache and many more. Hike also showed off a filter that changes the user’s face to look like actor Ranveer Singh and even Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. It plans to update these filters on a weekly basis to ensure users have new content to be excited about.