On November 18th, 2017, the LiveChat headquarters hosted yet another of our hackathon events. LiveChat hackathons aim to gather creative minds to turn ideas into reality and work on fresh means of communication. But most of all, they provide space where people from various fields, from programming through design to marketing, can work together, network and have fun.
This time, with the open and flexible API of the new LiveChat product, chat.io, the participants were given more freedom and opportunities than ever before.
It was our 3rd hackathon and we loved it! We met a bunch of developers who proved that online communication is a very wide topic. They built inspiring tools that may help companies improve the way they talk with customers.
— Bartosz Olchówka, CTO at LiveChat
LiveChat Hackathon #3 gathered 9 teams of various fields of expertise. We purposefully didn't give them any specific task: we were curious what they would come up with, given a set of tools and a development platform.
As always, we were thrilled to see the results.
The first prize was awarded to the project taking chat.io to a whole new dimension in the virtual reality. The team also created speech recognition to make it possible to dictate messages. Awesome presentation!
"IMO, this vision is great! Thinking about that, I believe that we will be able to go even one step further and maybe in the future customers will talk with brands via LiveChat using VR tools. In this way businesses will have an easy access to the data on how customers act, react and interact while communicating with their companies."
— Patrycja Bilińska, PR Specialist at LiveChat
The second prize went to the team which created an app to analyze customers' emotions and display their current mood in real time to support agents.
Finally, the third prize was awarded to the chat.io and BotEngine.ai integration which recognizes keywords and bans the customers who keep using the blacklisted phrases during the conversation.
But that's not all! Our own LiveChat Product Team gathered on the hackathon day and created a new feature for LiveChat onboarding. You should hear about it soon!
"The creative atmosphere around helped us create a fun feature that we wanted to add for a long time. Thanks for the great event and I'm waiting for the next one!"
— Łukasz Wojciechowski, Developer at LiveChat
The hackathon was also an opportunity for us to collect feedback about our software and tools. When answering the questions of the participants we learned a lot about what the developers really expect from our products. We were also able to define which parts of the products and the documentation need improvement — we all learn from each other on hackathons, after all.
"Seeing other developers work with your API is eye-opening. We can understand the pain points of our documentation and the building apps flow."
— Bartosz Olchówka, CTO at LiveChat
All in all, the hackathon was a success and proved that there are still fresh ways to use a seemingly simple chatting software. Thanks for great work, everyone, and we hope to see even more of you next time!
New to hackathons?
If the idea of a hackathon sounds tempting but you haven't taken part in such event before, check out these articles:
Hackathons are fun and not just about winning. They will expose you to new ideas, new libraries, new tools and new people, so don't be shy — let's deploy!
