Side Project: Conversation Player

Here’s a side project I’ve been working on. It’s a widget that plays back conversations in real time. Here’s a video demo of it:

The idea is to share text message snippets in a more digestible manner. The usual way to distribute a chat log to a friend would to send them a transcript of the messages, along with timestamps and all. The information is there, but it’s mentally taxing to read through it, and it’s especially difficult to make sense of the timestamps.

We figured it would be much easier to watch the conversation unfold in real time. This way, you see the conversation one message at a time, instead of all of it at once.

In the future, this will be a widget that you can embed in a blog or website. The reader can toggle the playback speed and use the slider to jump anywhere in the conversation.

We also built a set of utilities to import conversations from Facebook Messenger and Skype into a JSON format that our app can understand. Right now, these utilities are a bit clumsy to work with, so we’re holding back on releasing the project.

Conversation Player is built using React. It’s my first time using React, so it was good coding practice. I also had to learn the whole modern Javascript setup with babel, browserify, webpack, and so on. Everything is buzzword compliant now. Yay!