About Chat

Ably Chat is a product dedicated to making it quick and easy to build chat functionality into new and existing applications. Use Ably Chat to build things such as a 1:1 customer support feature, or add a chat component to a livestreaming platform that serves hundreds of thousands of users.

The Chat SDK contains a set of purpose-built APIs that abstract away the complexities involved in how you would architect chat features. It utilizes Ably's platform to benefit from all of the same performance guarantees and scaling potential.

Chat features

Ably Chat provides the following key features:

Rooms and messages

Rooms are used to organize and separate your users and chat messages into 'chat rooms'. They are the entry object into chat and provide access to all other chat features, such as messages, online status, and typing indicators.

Each room can represent a 1:1 chat between an agent and a customer, a private message between two users in a chat application, a group conversation, or the chat section of a livestream with thousands of users.

Messages enable users to communicate with one another in the room. Messages sent by users are received by all those who have subscribed to receive them within that room.

Presence

Presence enables you to display the status of every user in the room, such as whether a user is online or offline. Users can also set additional information about their profile or set a custom status, such as 'Away'.

Message reactions

Message reactions enable users to send reactions to messages, such as 👍 or ❤. Users can also see which other users reacted to a message.

Typing indicators

Typing indicators let users see when others start and stop typing a message. They enable you to display a message such as John is typing... or when too many users are typing, something like Multiple people are typing... or 12 people are typing....

Room reactions

Room reactions enable users to broadcast ephemeral sentiments using emojis, such as 👍 or ❤. Room reactions are used to broadcast a general sentiment to the entire room rather than reacting to a single message. A common use case is sports fans all sending a heart when their team scores.

Demo

Take a look at a livestream basketball game with some simulated users chatting built using the Chat SDK. The source code is available in GitHub.

Next steps