Right Speech Bubble

It marks spoken words or conversation, without adding a feeling.

Speech balloons have a long history. A history of visual art traces bubble-text—the words attached to a pictured speaker—to examples as early as the second century BCE. Speech scrolls, ribbon- or scroll-shaped writing that carries a figure's words, are documented by 900 CE. Comics later made the balloon a familiar way to show dialogue.

Comics gave different shapes to dialogue, thoughts, anger, and several speakers; messaging later reused the speech balloon to signal conversation. A French Tintin comic in 1930 mixed narration captions (text boxes) with speech balloons, although its cartoonist, Hergé, favored balloons. A separate computer path ran through the Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars fonts, designed in 1990–1991, then Microsoft's reorganized Wingdings set, released in 1992. Unicode maps Wingdings glyph ID 0041 to 🗩.

Why does it show as a box?

No font glyph means a missing-glyph box.

The font supplies the outline, so stroke weight and tail detail can vary. If both the selected font and its fallback lack the glyph, a box appears; the character's meaning has not changed.

Old Wingdings text relies on a font remapping, not this portable Unicode character. On a system without that font, the underlying text can appear as a letter or the symbol can disappear.