Receipts

Inspiration

indexing and searching on iMsg sucks. if you have ever tried to find an old text with a friend, you've probably seen the alert: "More results will be shown when Messages finishes indexing." Here's the thing, it never seems to finish indexing. Even when texts show, the full history doesn't and it's hard to search through because iMsg filters aren't great. We knew there had to be a better solution for searching through your texts.

What it does

Receipts let's users upload their chat.db file from their Mac. Then, Receipts indexes messages, allowing for users to:

1. Search for exact keywords and find every single text containing it
2. Ask Receipts questions about their conversations. For example, "When is Shayaan's birthday?" to which Receipts would search through conversations, and find Shayaan once mentioned his birthday is July 7th.

Challenges we ran into

There isn't an official iMessage API that let's you search through your messages. Additionally, you have no way of accessing all of your texts from an iPhone. We got around this by making Receipts a website for users on MacOS, where they can download their chat.db file and upload it to Receipts. From there, we can access the user's full chat history. Vercel has a 100mb upload limit but most people's chat.db file exceeds that by a long shot, so for now we're running it locally.

Built With

• nextjs
• numpy
• pandas
• python
• pytorch
• typescript
• vercel