Home-grown social messaging platform Hike Messenger has launched a new feature -- Stories. A feature that will allow people to share stories about their lives and real moments.

Users can share stories with their friends through photos and videos. Stories are ephemeral and vanish 48 hours after being posted.

A user who posts a Story can see how many people and who all ‘viewed’ that particular Story, the company said. The update came within three months of Hike raising $175-million funding from China’s Tencent and Foxconn.

Hike also launched its own ‘Camera’ built into the app making it quick and easy for people to take photos when use the messenger. In addition, it announced ‘Live filters’, a brand new feature that uses Hike’s new camera to automatically detect and recognise a user’s face using machine learning and allows people to easily decorate their faces in photos.

Live filters Hike has 12 Live filters available at launch, ranging from a Black and White Sunglasses, to a Turban and a Moustache and many more. For example, the filter can change a user’s face to the actor Ranveer Singh and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi, similar to features available in Snapchat.

Hike plans to update these filters on a weekly basis to ensure users have new content to be excited about, it said.

“One of our goals for 2016 has been to bring photos at the centre of Hike and with Stories and Live Filters, we are doing just that. We believe our users are going to love Stories, Camera and Live Filters that we are announcing today, especially with increasing access to cheaper and faster data,” Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger, said.

“We are now charting into the realm of augmented reality where we’re going from ‘Smartphones with Cameras’ that just take photos to ‘Smartphones with Eyes’ that can see,” Mittal added.

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