Slack on steroids: how Teamchat aims to be the smartest chat platform yet

Today, doctors, grocers, and plumbers alike use chat to communicate with their customers. Tencent’s all-powerful WeChat even lets you go so far as to message your way into getting a pizza delivered directly to your home. It’s great that we’ve really tapped into the power of chat to improve our offline existence. So, why do we continue to lag behind in exploring the massively infinite universe of our online experience?

“It’s true, there are so many apps out there that let you send texts, photos, and videos but that’s one dimension,” explains Beerud Sheth, founder of Webaroo-owned Teamchat. “We’ve taken chat to its logical extreme. Regular computing means that humans behave like computers, but messaging can force computers to behave like humans.”

Teamchat is essentially popular office messaging app, Slack, on steroids. It can be integrated into other apps, provides a tremendous degree of customization and automation, and, as Beerud explains, has tons of use cases.

Bots, chatlets, and open APIs, oh my!

In my opinion, Teamchat’s two most powerful weapons are its unique use of chatlets and bots.

Chatlets (chat + applet) help organize the professional stream of consciousness by allowing users to summarize replies in a conversation. “A lack of organization is the biggest problem with most chat apps,” explains Beerud. “The chatlet detects parts of a conversation that should be together and makes things easier to read.”

For example, if your team is taking an internal vote on the location for their next conference, the Teamchat app lets you include “upvote” and “downvote” buttons on each of the options. It then aggregates employee responses into an easy-to-read format. If you’re asking everyone to type in their sales numbers at 1PM on a Monday afternoon when your team is abuzz with talk about their recent weekend, Teamchat uses an algorithm to identify and aggregate all of the relevant responses into a single channel. “It’s no longer just about chatting, communication, and collaboration – the important aspect that we tackle is actual coordination,” Beerud explains.

Bots are a slightly more complicated affair. “On the mobile device, we’ve finally reached the limits of Steve Job’s ‘app metaphor’,” says Beerud. “Most of us only use a handful of apps each day. In the same way that the browser and website paradigm has replaced desktop and applications, the bots and messaging paradigm will replace apps. “

Bots are essentially programs that communicate with users or other programs and hide secretly in a Teamchat flow. They can even disguise themselves as just any other user. A bot can do everything from comparing your team’s actual daily performance with its sales plan to integrating your LinkedIn feed into your chat flow.

The “Sentiment Analysis Bot” analyzes words to figure out how positive or negative your team is.

Teamchat can be used for anything