Tutorials: Chat (3)

Message Markup Language (MML) enables you to build an interactive messaging experience. MML supports embedding elements as simple as a button to your message or as complex as date pickers and custom forms within your chat experience. MML also supports images, icons, and tables out of the box. The goal for MML is to provide

Livestreams are everywhere these days, from popular gaming sites such as Twitch to more casual everyday apps like Instagram. Apps use live streaming and live video to help connect users and add another level of interactivity to their platform. This post is still useful, but out of date. Stream now offers a Live Video Streaming

Note: This blog is archived due to limited compatibility with an old version of the React Native chat SDK. Please check our latest tutorial or our finished Slack clone. In Part 2 of this tutorial, we covered how to build Slack-like navigation, channel list screen, channel screen, reaction picker, and action sheet. In this tutorial,

Note: This blog is archived due to limited compatibility with an old version of the React Native chat SDK. Please check our latest tutorial or our finished Slack clone. React Native has come a long way since its first release in 2015. In fact, it has enough components, APIs, and supporting libraries in its present

SwiftUI becomes more popular as it gets more capable with each iOS release. However, it may take some time until it's a better option than UIKit to build complex user experiences such as chat and video calls. That doesn't mean you need to stick with UIKit until all the SDKs you use support SwiftUI. In

In most cases, when building a chat app, it's essential to provide adequate privacy and security to your users. This can be done using cryptographic methods such as end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is becoming a mainstream expectation, as it's featured in the biggest chat apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram. In this article, you'll learn

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

When transmitting or storing user data, especially private conversations, it's essential to consider employing cryptographic techniques to ensure privacy. By reading this tutorial, you'll learn how to end-to-end encrypt data in web applications using nothing but JavaScript and the Web Crypto API, which is a native browser API. Please note that this tutorial is very

Most of the time, when building a chat application, it's essential to have some level of control over what your users can share and say to each other. In this tutorial, we'll use Swift Lambda and Stream's powerful chat API to build a content moderation system that can prevent users from sending unwanted content. In

In this tutorial, we'll build a chat app with a dashboard that allows an admin user to switch between one-on-one customer chat channels in the same window. As a busy customer support representative, you don’t want to be stuck with a chat app that opens each chat in a new window, forcing you to cycle

In this tutorial, we'll build a chat app that sends a copy of a chat transcript in an email using SendGrid. Imagine being able to automatically inform your sales team when one of their clients has chatted with your support team. This app sends a transcript of that chat directly to the salesperson's email address

Can you imagine viewing your sales chat transcripts in real time from your sales CRM? Would your chat applications improve with more timely handling of customer chat inquiries? This post demonstrates how to leverage the powerful Stream Chat API to take action with a chat transcript as the chat takes place, response by response. The

Did you know you can use Swift in the backend to build a chatbot and deploy it to AWS? We've recently published an Open Source project called Swift Lambda to make the process easier. In this tutorial, we'll use Swift Lambda to build a chatbot that can reply to user messages automatically using Stream's powerful

This tutorial will explore how to make a chat widget that connects to the HubSpot CRM to (1) create or update a HubSpot CRM Contact with the user’s info, and (2) save chat transcripts in HubSpot. We’ll use the versatile Stream Chat client and its webhooks to accomplish this. The steps provided here will help

In this tutorial, we'll integrate chat in an e-commerce app using Stream Chat's Swift SDK. It's crucial for buyers that may need immediate communication for payments, delivery status, last-minute changes, and refunds. Those screenshots show a button leading to a chat screen where the buyer can get information in real time from the seller. This

This post will demonstrate how to configure a Lead creation in Zendesk from a customer inquiry via a landing page/sales chat widget. We'll build a full-screen experience that can be embedded on your homepage or landing pages. Our chat experience will start with a simple user registration to lead capture. It will ask for first

In this tutorial, learn how to build a Stream chat widget that connects to the HubSpot CRM to automatically create a new contact when a customer initiates a chat. This widget, backed by the Stream chat API, can be easily embedded to your site as a chat widget for sales, support, lead capture, or a

In this tutorial, we'll build a TeleHealth iOS app where gym members and instructors can interact in an online virtual fitness class using Stream Chat, to deliver fully featured chat components, and Dolby.io, to provide quality audio and video. By the end, we'll have an application similar to the screenshots below. As a bonus, it's

In this tutorial, we'll build an iOS app for livestream events where attendees and speakers can interact in a virtual conference room using Stream Chat, to deliver fully featured chat components, and Dolby.io, to provide quality live-streamed audio and video for large audiences. By the end, we'll have an application similar to the screenshots below.

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

In this tutorial, we'll build an in-app support system using Stream Chat's Swift SDK, which you can quickly integrate in new or existing apps. It's crucial for users that may need immediate information or assistance in completing a task. It's frequently present in banking, e-commerce, delivery, and ride sharing apps. Those screenshots show a button

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

In Part 1 of this series, we created a simple chat application for iOS and macOS using SwiftUI and Stream Chat's Swift SDK, but it only had a single channel. In this tutorial, we'll improve on it by implementing a channels screen with three features: join, create, and search channels. Although Stream Chat provides a

In this tutorial, we'll integrate video chat into an iOS application. To do this, we integrate Dolby.io's Interactivity APIs, formally known as Voxeet, into our application. Video chat can easily be integrated with Stream Chat API for a seamless communication experience. Note: This article's content is outdated. We now have our own Voice & Video

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

In this tutorial, we'll build a simple chat application for iOS and macOS using SwiftUI and Stream Chat's Swift SDK. Although Stream provides a suite of UIKit components that work out-of-the-box, we can use use the low-level client to develop custom components with SwiftUI. If you get lost during this tutorial, you can check the

Live streaming apps have become the most popular type of application in the App Stores. Big companies, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, have, at least, one app offering this kind of service. For example: YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Periscope. All of those have a common companion feature: Livestream Chat. Livestream Chat is a crucial

Apple's recent release of Mac Catalyst makes it possible for iOS and macOS apps to share mostly the same native codebase. While in the past, a desktop and mobile cross-platform codebase commonly meant a web app packaged in a portable format, now it can be achieved with native code just as quickly. That means less

In this tutorial, we'll build encrypted chat on iOS using Swift. We'll combine Stream Chat and Virgil Security. Both Stream Chat and Virgil make it easy to create a solution with high security with all the features you expect. These two services allow developers to integrate chat that is zero-knowledge. The application embeds Virgil Security's

As we seek to still connect with friends and family while we all #stayhome, live streaming and video conferencing have become insanely popular. These technologies have always been great tools for connecting with coworkers and loved ones who are not located nearby; however, we are now seeing incredible growth in their use for connecting with

💡 An updated version of this tutorial exists! Angular devs can now use our dedicated Angular Chat SDK to build in-app messaging experiences faster than ever. You can still skim the post below for inspiration, but our new official Angular Chat App Tutorial is the place to find up-to-date info and a much simpler approach.

"Social logins" are a very popular alternative to creating a login and password for a website or application that is new to a user. With "social login", a user makes use of an existing account, like Google or Facebook, to sign up for or log in to another application. This means users don't have to

Since April 2020, all apps that use a third-party or social login service are required to offer Sign in with Apple if they want to be accepted in the App Store. In a previous tutorial, we walked through the process of building a simple clone of Apple's iMessage. In this tutorial, we'll go through the

Group chat can get a bit messy, especially if it’s public and anyone can join. Making a group chat invite-only can help manage the content of the group and the sanity of those in it, in addition to preventing spam users and bots. In this tutorial, we’ll be building an invite-only chat room where only

Messaging apps are becoming more and more popular as a means through which to connect with friends and family. They're convenient and provide an easy and affordable means of communication. A recent study by Statista revealed that the current number of smartphone users in the world today is 3.5 billion; this means 45.12% of the

One of the fastest ways to build applications has always been Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a feature-packed web development framework that makes it easy for novices and experts alike to easily stand up an application. When you want to add chat to your application, using Stream Chat makes that task just as

Language barriers can hinder growth and build a wall between your business and its potential customers, ultimately limiting your market and costing you money. If a customer reaches out to you by chat in German or Spanish, but you don’t understand the language, wouldn't it be nice to still be able to win them over?!

Flutter is the latest cross-platform UI toolkit (provided by Google) for building Android, iOS, and even desktop apps that is gaining popularity amongst developers. Stream Chat, on the other hand, is an enterprise-grade chat solution that offers extensive APIs and SDKs to power chat on multiple platforms. When they come together, magic happens... 🔮 In

Customer support live chat is an incredible tool for collecting valuable feedback from your customers and increasing your website engagement rate. With that said, it can take weeks or even months to build a functional, scalable, reliable real-time chat application. Luckily, Stream Chat makes it super easy to create such an app quickly; you can

Are you thinking of building a chat application in Go? You’ve come to the right place! This post will walk you through everything you need to know to make a chat app with the Stream Chat API and will show a working example server that ties all the concepts discussed in this tutorial together. The

Communicating with an AI chatbot can be a frustrating experience. However, with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, there is no excuse for not providing a positive experience for chat users. AI assistant advances allow machines and computers to process, understand, and reply to human messages in a genuinely useful way to the human

Note: This blog is archived due to limited compatibility with an old version of the React Native chat SDK. Please check our latest tutorial or our finished Slack clone. React Native has a significant footprint in the mobile development world. And with every new release, it gets better and better in terms of development speed

In this tutorial, we’ll build a functional clone of iMessage using Stream Chat iOS SDK. Building a messaging app used to be difficult; but in this tutorial, you’ll get a chat experience up and running in roughly 20 minutes! If you get lost during this tutorial, you can check: The iMessage Clone GitHub repo The

Apache Cordova is an application development framework that allows you to develop cross-platform apps using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Its main advantage over traditional app development workflows is that it allows for the use of a single codebase for Android, iOS, and the browser, which significantly reduces the time and cost

One of the most significant advantages of using Stream to accomplish this feat is that it significantly reduces the time and effort required; Stream's Chat API allows you to build a fully-featured user engagement platform in just a few hours. Source Code Here is a preview of the app we’ll be building. You can clone

As previously mentioned in a blog post by Stream, Pusher recently announced its intention to shut down their real-time messaging service, Chatkit, effective April 23rd, 2020, to narrow its product focus to Channels and Beams. Although Pusher Chatkit fulfilled the basic premise of providing a real-time chat solution, their feature set and capabilities were way

This tutorial will take you through how to create a live chat app that responds in real-time, with the help of Dialogflow and Stream’s Messaging Platform. We’ll be making a chatbot that interprets the intent of a user’s input using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and responds appropriately, giving the information it has gathered. Prerequisites You'll

In this tutorial, we'll build an encrypted chat/messaging example app for Android. To do this, we will combine the Stream Chat Platform and Virgil Security. Stream and Virgil make it easy to build a solution with excellent security by combining all of the features you would expect as a developer when creating a messaging app.

We’ll be leveraging AWS Polly’s natural speech capabilities to implement this feature and Stream's Messaging API for our chat infrastructure and interface. AWS Polly supports dozens of languages and a wide selection of natural-sounding male and female voices. When you send text to AWS Polly's API, it returns the audio to your application as a

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU data protection law (passed into law in 2018) that determines how companies use and protect EU citizens’ data. While you might feel this doesn’t concern you, it very likely does! As long as you have EU residents making use of your app, you need to follow

In this article, we will be creating a chat application using React and Stream Chat. The app will feature an authorization page for login/signup, followed by a chat view that allows for communication between several authorized users. After creating the chat application, we will deploy it to Heroku, to take it public. The final application

Stream's Messaging API allows you to build real-time chat applications that are scalable, fault-tolerant, secure, and fast, so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel by starting from scratch. You’ll take less time to create a robust app (like days to create a real-time chat application with Stream instead of months)!. By the end of

💡 This blog post describes an outdated approach to using Javascript against our Chat platform. Javascript developers can now use SDKs specific to their tech stack, like our dedicated Angular Chat SDK. It allows you to build chat experiences with ease. You can still refer to the post below for its concepts and ideas, but

In this post, we'll explore how to do two things: 1) create live chat message bubbles in Android that are similar to WhatsApp and iMessage and 2) customize Stream Chat's UI Components. We'll customize Stream Chat Android's built-in UI components by plugging in a custom message view. This allows us to focus on the text

Let's create a functional chat interface right in the terminal with Node.js! Although building a chat app is no small task, with the help of Stream's fully featured Chat API, it'll only take a few lines of code, as you'll see. Prerequisites Before proceeding with this tutorial, make sure you have Node.js and Yarn installed

How much do you love when you can just jump on a company's website and chat with one of their representatives to take care of your business; no picking up the phone, no waiting days for an email back?? Customer support live chat is a critical tool for every forward-thinking business. In this tutorial, you’ll

💡 There’s a newer version of this tutorial! Stream now offers a dedicated Angular Chat SDK, paired with a new official Angular Chat App Tutorial. The new SDK drastically simplifies the development process described below. You can still skim this post for inspiration, but please refer to the new resources linked above for consistently up-to-date

The PHP backend generates a token for the user and sends it to the front end (JavaScript UI) during login or registration. The token helps connect the front end to the chat API, allowing the user to access the chat interface. Prerequisites To follow along with this tutorial, you need to have a basic understanding

One increasingly common feature in chat apps is the ability to send self-destructing messages, also known as "ephemeral" messages. When this feature is enabled, the messaging system automatically erases the content minutes or seconds after the message is sent. This deletion is effective on all the devices that received the message, as well as on

People long for connection, and technology has allowed us to connect with those who aren't physically near in increasingly many ways over the last few decades. With applications like text messaging, and then group messaging, with our music, photos and movies moving to the cloud, we've been able to share more and more across great

In any chat application, one of the most integral features is being able to notify users of new messages. While providing this feature comes with its own set of challenges (listeners, timing, notification types, keeping track of which messages are read, etc.), notifying users of unread messages doesn't have to be challenging. Among the many

Update: Here is an excellent post on the vision for 2020's tech trends in cloud computing between the CEO of Ionic, Max Lynch, and CEO of Stream, Thierry Schellenbach. There is a massive difference between platforms such as React Native and Flutter compared to Ionic. Ionic believes that the open technology that powers today’s web

In this post, we are going to implement a simple Group Chat application with Vanilla Javascript and Stream Chat! Stream Chat allows you to rapidly ship real-time messaging systems that are reliable and robust, without the overhead cost and time of managing the infrastructure by yourself. And it’s pretty easy to use... You’ll find out

Creating an application is a lot of work! Deploying your application shouldn't be. Every developer has said at one time or another, "it works locally, but I can't get it to work on the server!"; it can take you hours, or even days, to figure out what went wrong and to put a fix in

Getting Started In any business interaction, it is vital to hold on to records of how you got to where you are. Not only can being able to reference previous transactions and interactions teach you about what you've done, it can help you make informed decisions about what you are going to do. With this

Ionic is an open-source framework that allows you to build and deploy apps that work across multiple platforms, such as iOS, Android, desktop, and the web as a Progressive Web App – all with the same code base. At first, Ionic was built to work with Angular, but with the release of Ionic 4, you

In this tutorial, we will show you how to process webhooks to send a message to a Slack channel! Here at Stream, we are big fans of Chat. With our chat API, we offer a webhook so that you can relay data to an endpoint of your choice. Webhooks are an excellent way to make

Managing microservices manually can get very complicated and takes the focus away from business logic. API gateways help take care of the various collective management and housekeeping tasks necessary for running microservices. One of the most popular API gateways is Kong. As the illustration below shows, Kong takes care of the tedious tasks involved in

Unlike an API request that's triggered when a request is sent, a webhook gets triggered when certain events occur within the cycle of an application. For example, when a new message is added on Stream Chat, the message.new event sends a payload to the webhook endpoint containing data about the message that was just sent.

This article describes how you can build and deploy a React Chat application powered by Stream’s Chat API to Netlify and Heroku. In this case, the React app will be deployed on Netlify, while the accompanying Node server will be deployed to Heroku. At the end of this article, you’ll see just how easy it

Initial Thoughts This tutorial will teach you how to build your own customer support chat experience and create a serverless chatbot! The end result will look much like this: The customer-facing chat experience is shown on the left, and the screen on the right shows the interface for support agents. Here’s a GIF of the

Many applications today inform users about important messages related to their application by sending notifications – this can be via push or web. With a web notification, a user can click on the notification and instantly get back to the application to further act on that piece of content. For Stream Chat applications, one of

Stream's Chat API provides a JS Chat SDK that you can use to build custom messaging solutions for your application. Requests from the SDK are authorized via an access token provided by a backend API. Due to the restriction of having to generate a JWT token on the backend, you will need an API that

React hooks, released in February 2019, have huge benefits when implemented in your application. Whether you've used hooks before or are just learning, this post aims to show you just how simple it is to implement them with Stream Chat. The Basics Using hooks with Stream Chat is as simple as it sounds. Wherever you

Overview Here at Stream, we’re known for our Feeds as a Service as well as our Chat as a Service product. Stream Chat was released out of beta late last year, and we’ve been receiving quite a few inquiries on how to structure a RESTful API to support the backend portion of chat. The backend

In this tutorial, we will build a chat application that’ll allow users to participate in a group discussion similar to how channels work in Slack. We’ll handle user authentication, and management using Auth0's Authentication-as-a-Service solution that allows developers to add authentication to any application without breaking a sweat easily. At the end of this article,

Conversational UI is a user interface that emulates a human to human conversation, while in reality, the human is interacting with a computer program. We’ve often seen this with the integration of AI chatbots and AI assistants. Conversational UI that involves speaking allows you to interact with a voice assistant, while typing allows you to

In my last tutorial here, we created a chatroom application using Laravel, Vue.js, and Stream Chat. Although we only covered the basics of getting our chatroom up and running, Stream Chat offers a lot of other functionality. In this tutorial, we will explore some of those functionalities, and we’ll be adding them to our chatroom

Wowza provides users with the ability to stream live video. Trusted by over 24,000 organizations to power video streaming, they offer an extremely flexible platform that’s easy to use for even the most novice streamer. This post is still useful, but out of date. Stream now offers a Live Video Streaming API! My team at

As healthcare technology advances, secure real-time telemedicine communication is becoming increasingly crucial to any modern medical application. It's essential to provide the technology experiences customers expect while protecting their privacy and data, like through HIPAA compliant chat. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which aims to provide and maintain data privacy for

When adding live video to your applications on Stream, we recommend checking out our newly released Video API! Using Stream Video, developers can build live video calling and conferencing, voice calling, audio rooms, and livestreaming from a single unified API, complete with our fully customizable UI Kits across all major frontend platforms. To learn more,

As healthcare technology advances, more patients expect healthcare applications to provide secure real-time communication. This often requires patients to exchange their protected health information (PHI) over in-app chat messaging. To maintain your users’ trust—and to ensure their privacy and data are protected—you must consider HIPAA compliance when building a chat experience. Note: In addition to

Being able to communicate with a group of people in real-time over chat is one of the most powerful features of modern messaging. Real-time messaging with groups of people can have live general discussions across the board as though it were a one-to-one chat, which makes sharing general information fast and easy. In this tutorial,

Unfortunately, there will always be users who tend toward using profanity within chat. As a developer, there will be a time that will come when you need to moderate this type of behavior. There's simply no way you will be able to manually watch all of the chat rooms and ban users because of their

Quick and active customer service is an integral part of any company or organization, especially those that conduct most of their business online. Quality customer service goes beyond merely fielding comments and questions from customers. The types of interactions your team has with your clients have a direct impact on how your customers perceive, use,

Chatbots allows ecommerce sites to provide more to their customers without the need for human intervention. Conversational experience is a powerful way to sell more on your ecommerce site. With the popularity of

Chat messaging is everywhere today. We can talk to customer support personnel through a web app that allows them to see our request and respond in real-time. We can interact with our friends and family, no matter where we are, through apps like WhatsApp and Facebook. There are multitudes of instant messaging apps, for many

Building a real-time chat messaging application can be daunting and time-consuming for project and development teams. One reason is that the backend and frontend infrastructures must handle many aspects, like security and scalability. To build the Python app, we will use Stream's API for chat to handle WebSocket connections and other heavy lifting using Go,

Create a React Native Chat App with Gifted Chat

When building a chat application, your head tends to spin in terms of what functionality you need. When building in-house, this process can turn into a nightmare.Thankfully, there are companies out there such as Stream that provide chat as a service as an API. In this tutorial, we will explore how to build a real-time

Is your chat going global? Worry less about the language barrier when you pair Amazon Translate with our real-time messaging API. When powering a chat product in a global environment, multilingual support should be top-of-mind. Doing so allows you to ensure that the communication barrier between yourself and the user on the other end is

Most tasks are repetitive and time-consuming. What if we could use a bot to help in doing the tasks instead? This will hugely increase productivity. Chatbots are fantastic for this.  In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through steps to adding a chatbot to your Stream Chat app using Dialogflow and Vue. At the end of

The other week, I set out to write a tutorial on how to integrate real-time Stream Chat in React Native. It wasn’t long before I started adding other dependencies such as Gifted Chat for the UI and Serverless for token generation server-side. I even had a bit of fun by integrating an autoresponder with facts

The Stream Chat API allows you to quickly and easily build powerful Android messaging applications and features — from a simple one to one messenger to building a full-scale Slack-like community. Stream Chat also supports Push Notifications out of the box and implementing them into your own React Native Chat app is a breeze. In this tutorial,

Are you ready to elevate your React and Redux skills to the next level? Look no further than Cabin — an immersive tutorial series designed to empower developers with the knowledge and expertise needed to build feature-rich, scalable social network applications. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your journey with React and Redux,