Chatist

Chatist bridges the gap between friends and family who do not have access to the same communication media. Not everybody has a phone number, but everybody should be able to contact their loved ones.

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Inspiration

We know a lot of family members that do not use (or have access to) the internet. It is quite difficult to stay in touch with them using conventional methods. You can also imagine having internet access but no phone number. How would you send a text message to family then? e.g: In airplanes, we have wifi but no service.

What it does

Chatist allows users to send text messages to phone numbers using our Website. Simply create an account, and you are good to go! Our simple user interface makes it easy to send messages to loved ones -- as long as you know their phone number, that is!

How we built it

We used the Twilio API extensively. We initially wrote all API calls using Python, but then chose to port all our functions over to Twilio Functions in order to take advantage of their streamlined services. We chose to use Firebase authentication for our login/registration system. We also used Vue.js and Node.js for our frontend and bootstrap to tie it all together.

Challenges we ran into

A lot; nothing was working. Auth0 did not recognize us, and we were honestly starting to not recognize ourselves.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have taken a step towards solving a major problem for people who don't have a phone number, but access to the internet.

What we learned

Technology is neat, and it allows us to think of more and more ways to connect with people. Specifically, we gained experience using the Twilio API and the Firebase platform.

What's next for Chatist

Short term:

  • Reduce risk of abusing messaging functionality by requiring email verification when making an account.

  • We reduced the attack vector of our Twilio API by only having one public API link, and doing all of the request sorting/processing inside it by calling private Functions. This does not restrict users from directly accessing the API link, however, and it is currently possible to completely bypass our website to send messages. We would fix that by enabling Firebase in our Twilio API function and matching requests to website users.

  • Our current Twilio Functions are able to receive SMS texts from phones, send SMS texts (triggered by our website or other events), and send voice calls. We are now in the position to add exciting features, such as a) scheduling periodic SMS messages to send b) allowing website users to send their messages using an automated voice call and c) enabling live chat between the phone user and the website user.

Long term:

World wide adoption of our app will naturally occur, as Twilio becomes the one and only way we communicate.

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