Valentine's Day 2016: Paul McCartney and Skype team up to bring you love mojis

Wondering what to gift your loved one on Valentine's Day? Fear not. You can now send Paul McCartney's personalised and unique musical emoji compositions via Skype. The online communications giant has teamed up with the former Beatle to create "love mojis."

The online calling giant owned by Microsoft has teamed up with the former Beatle star to create "love mojis", in efforts to bring a musical aspect to Valentine's celebrations.

Skype stepped up its emoji game recently by introducing mojis, an alternative GIF feature that allows users to send short video clips instead of regular emojis. In efforts to make the feature more popular and offer diverse expression modes, it recently enlisted McCartney's help to create the new "love mojis", with his legendary voice and music.

In a blog, Skype said: "We are thrilled to announce a partnership with the legendary Sir Paul McCartney to bring you a new, exclusive set of love-inspired mojis. We've coupled original Skype designs with unique musical compositions from Paul so you can always express your love to friends and family around the world, no matter what you're trying to say."

In an interview with Noisey's Eric Sundermann, the legendary musician said, "I think the only danger with this project was whether I just thought, 'Is this just too frivolous for me to be spending my time on?' There will be people who will say that, and, of course, I'm setting myself up by saying it myself. And it means that I have a little period of time doing what I don't do, normally."

" I find that when you come back to writing a normal song, you're a little bit fresher, you haven't just been churning these songs out. It freshens your approach. So it's kind of nice, it just makes what you do normally quite attractive to get back to once you've gone off-piste," he added.

Skype first introduced its custom, partner-driven emojis in September 2015 in a collaboration with BBC, Universal Studios and the Disney Muppets to roll out around 150 different short video clips and animation alternatives. Later it added emojis depicting Indian food and culture, also incorporating video clips from popular Bollywood TV series.

The move to incorporate cultural diversity and offer celebrity-branded, customised services reflects Skype's intentions to keep users engaged with new stuff. Although Skype's popularity as a free video-calling service has so far remained unchallenged, it faces emerging competition in the mobile messaging platform from WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and Line.

Skype's new "love mojis" will be rolled out on Windows, Android, Mac and iOS systems on 11 February.