LiveChat’s online hackathon, .txtlss, was all about disrupting the way we think about online communication. Today, we want to present you the winner applications, whose authors managed to push the boundaries of text-based communication.

Third Place: EmotionBot

Third place went to the app that uses the latest Natural Language Processing research in order to display to agents visual cues about customers’ emotions.

Right now, EmotionBot can detect and depict 7 emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, guilt, and shame. As a user, you can choose how you want to display emotions: as Unicode emojis, memory orbs, text labels, and many more.

Thanks to EmotionBot, agents will be able to better recognize the emotions of customers, building stronger engagement and more efficient communication. It may also serve as a reminder that on the other end, there’s another human being, who simply needs to be understood.

Second Place: Emotican

Emotican was quite a surprise to our jury. A team of three developed a simple game for young children with autism. The game teaches children to identify emotions by letting them guess emotions depicted on images sent in the chat. The app uses IBM Watson for voice input, thanks to which players can speak either English or Spanish, and type in 19 languages.

The app allows children encountering difficulties in communicating with others to gain emotion recognition skills, while having fun at the same time. It’s integrated with Facebook Messenger but can be extended to other chat platforms as well.

The game comes with a dashboard, which from the technical point of view, is a fullscreen app. The dashboard presents user statistics for a better analysis of children’s responses. Also, the developers configured two Chat Actions – one for getting user-specific metrics and the other for providing feedback and guidelines to the player.

First place: SneakPeek

The winners amazed us with the simplicity of their solution.

SneakPeek allows customers to see the preview of the links sent by an agent. It’s as simple as that. The app authors noticed the need for link unfurling and provided a solution that significantly enhances the LiveChat experience.

For visitors using the on-site chat widget, SneakPeek provides clarity. You know where the link will take you, no matter if it was built using shorteners like bitly. For businesses, this functionality means greater user engagement, increased CTR, and a better mobile chat experience, since there’s no need for constant minimizing the window to see the link’s content.

The end of the hackathon, but not innovation

The .txtlss hackathon has already ended, but you don’t need to wait for a special occassion to improve or even reshape the world of online communication. Developer Program offers you the tools to develop and market innovative solutions. Sign up to Developer Console to start building apps.