By now everybody knows that Facebook has done everything in its power to imitate Snacphat across its entire portfolio, but now Snacphat is fighting back with a few new tools of its own.
A backdrops feature essentially lets you green-screen yourself into different scenes. Tap the Scissors button to locate the new Backdrop icon.
The tool only works with photo snaps for the time being, but it essentially lets you trace objects or people in a snap and replace the background with colorful patterns. The patterns will rotate daily, so don’t get too attached to any of the new backdrops.
Voice filters are exactly what they sound like: they change the way your voice sounds in your snaps, without the need for a visual Lens. Just tap the speaker icon once you’ve recorded a snap, and choose one of the characters.
Lastly, there’s a paperclip button that lets you link to websites. That helps add some context to your snaps, but it will probably be most useful for businesses and organizations that want to promote their own products and services with a direct call to action. Viewers can simply swipe up to open the link right within Snapchat.
The update give Snapchatters plenty of new of new toys to play around with, and help Snapchat get ahead of Facebook again, if only for a little while. The features are rolling out to users on Android and iOS today.
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