Developing a font is something very complex and requires a lot of expertise, attention to detail and talent. Serifs yes or no, the contrast of a font that has a big impact on the grey tone of a text and many other characteristics give letters a soul and give a text a certain look. This is why there are professional typographers out there, who produce fonts.
In autumn 2015, Adobe presented a new project in Adobe MAX: Adobe Project Faces. It looks like a font generation app, but see for yourself (for all non-Americans: Don’t worry, this is not a cult, but a product presentation in American style):
I have to admit: Adobe really put a lot of brain and effort into this and obviously worked with absolute typography-pros. Thumbs up! Many aspects of typography have been taken into account here. However, what about: the interplay of letters, the harmony of the copy as a whole and many details like ligatures for example. At the moment, I doubt if Project Face really comes in handy when producing fonts for a big amount of text. It might work for short texts, posters or headers though. If you ever produce a font in Adobe Project Face and want to use it for a big amount of text, please: test, test, test! That simply means: Go into Indesign, put a lot of placeholder text on a few pages and print them out.
If Project Faces becomes really popular and takes over in the future, the question comes up, if we will read less books and magazines because of a possibly impaired readability – if Project Face will be used for the main copy by designers who are not very familiar with typography (is Project Face targeted at them? Who knows.) A question, that might be answered not before many years have passed ....