Design

“Live chat,” as Stream recently wrote, “lets participants skip formalities and get right to the point.” In keeping with this spirit, we’ll do just that. But, first, some quick scene-setting: as a follow-up to our best practices overview for Sales & Customer Service (and what better time than now, the holiday season?) we sat down

Americans send and receive an average of 94 text messages per day. If we’re awake for 16 hours each day, that comes to 5.8 texts an hour, or just less than one every ten waking minutes. And though these text messages stats don’t include in-app chat — communication among people on third-party apps, such as

Throughout its regular season, Major League Baseball selects a “game of the week” to broadcast live on YouTube. Along with streaming the game, viewers can participate in or read the accompanying chat. Slow-moving by nature, baseball produces its share of lulls, and it is those times between pitches or innings that make for good browsing

In its simplest form, livestream chat is a real-time message board whose participants are communicating in the moment. The practice has gained significant popularity over the last several years — and is accelerating during the last six months —with apps like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and Periscope all adopting the experience within their platforms. Live

Adding chat to your application has traditionally been a rather complicated process. Most of the early direct messaging with chat were handled by dedicated third party applications like AOL Instant Messenger. The internet thrived early on because it made messaging your friends, receiving news, building communities through private or group chat rooms easy and quick

Chatbots provide an automated conversational interface that can positively impact your business. Imagine a customer calls a support center, and they're stuck waiting to get a simple question answered. Not only do customers get frustrated, but having human beings respond to each call is difficult and challenging to scale. Chatbots are where the conversational UI