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Chat is becoming an increasingly popular communication medium in both business and social contexts. Businesses use chat for customer and employee intra-company communication like with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chanty, HubSpot Live Chat, Help Scout, etc. Most social networks and communication apps also offer chat as an option by default, like on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Other apps like Discord, Whatsapp, and Telegram are mostly chat-based, with group chats being one of their main functionalities.
While there exist numerous products to facilitate chat, you may need a custom-tailored solution for your site that fits your particular communication needs. For example, many of these products are stand-alone apps and may not be able to integrate within your own site. Having your users leave your website to chat may not be the greatest option as it can affect user experience and conversion. On the flip side, building a chat app from scratch can be a daunting and sometimes overwhelming task. However, by using APIs like Twilio Conversations you can simplify the process of creating them. These communication APIs handle group creation, adding participants, sending messages, notifications, among other important chat functions. Backend apps that use these APIs only have to handle authentication and make calls to these APIs. Front-end apps then display conversations, groups, and messages from the backend.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a group chat app using the Twilio Conversations API. The front end for this app will be built using HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JavaScript. It will allow users to create group chats, send invites, login, as well as send and receive messages. The backend will be a Node.js app. It will provide authentication tokens for chat invitees and manage chat creation.