Create and get conversations and participants with the Realtime API  ✨ preview  ✨

The Realtime API provides you with a continuous, up-to-date flow of your TalkJS data without the need to send repeated requests or open a chat UI. And the options available on the Realtime API keep expanding. From version 0.27.0 of the JavaScript SDK, you can use ConversationRef.set, which allows you to set properties of a conversation and manage a user’s participation within it. Additionally, with ConversationRef.createIfNotExists you can streamline the process of creating a conversation if it doesn’t already exist, and to automatically add the current user as a participant if they aren't already one.

Version 0.28.0 then adds ParticipantRef, which allows you to reference a specific user's participation in a conversation. This can be useful for operations such as joining or leaving a conversation, or controlling a user’s access. In addition, ConversationRef.participant offers easy access to a participant reference within a conversation, while ConversationSnapshot.joinedAt provides the date and time (as a Unix timestamp in milliseconds) that a user joined the conversation. With these updates, you have even greater flexibility in accessing and managing conversation conversations and participants of your chat.

Changed

• The CloseButton, SearchButton  and ActionMenu built-in components available in ChatHeader now accept a label prop that allows you to set your own label for these buttons. Setting your own label can be useful if you’d like to add your own custom translation for these labels.
• The count of the number of unread messages a user has in a conversation is now capped at a thousand. A user can have more than a thousand unread messages, but the count won’t increase beyond a thousand.
• Users accessing TalkJS with multiple IDs on the same device can now manage their desktop notification preference settings separately, on a per-user basis.

Fixed

• Flutter SDK (0.13.1): Fixed a stack overflow issue when comparing sessions.
• Fixed issues where Flutter webview faced a build issue on Xcode 15 and Xcode 16/iOS 18.
• Fixed an issue where the conversation actions button in the chat header didn't have an aria-label and title attribute set for screen readers.

New tutorial

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Highlight

Add custom emojis

You can now add your own custom emojis to your chat 😀

Using the customEmojis option, you can add images for emojis that your users can use in their messages, or as emoji reactions.

To add a custom emoji, specify an emoji name and a url to the emoji image you’d like to add. The emoji name must be unique, and must start and end with a colon, for example :coffee-mug:, :cool-doge: or :roomba-cat:. The image URL must be a URL to an image file, such as an SVG, GIF or PNG. The image itself can be any size, as long as it’s square (that is, has the same width and height). 

You can then add your custom emojis when creating your chat UI, for example as follows:

 customEmojis: {
   ':coffee-mug:': { url: 'https://example.com/images/coffee-mug.png' },
   ':roomba-cat:': { url: 'https://example.com/images/roomba-cat.gif' },
   ':cool-doge:': { url: 'https://example.com/images/cool-doge.gif' },
 }

Read more about custom emojis.

Overview of other changes

Added

• JavaScript SDK (0.24.0): Added support for subscribing to a user via UserRef.subscribe, which returns a UserSubscription.
• JavaScript SDK (0.26.0): Added customEmojis setting to createChatbox, createInbox and createPopup.

Changed

• JavaScript SDK (0.25.0): Removed UserData from the Realtime API. Everything that previously returned UserData now returns UserSnapshot.
• JavaScript SDK (0.25.0): Changed UserSnapshot.locale and SetUserParams.role, so that these are now correctly marked as nullable.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug where UserRef.set in the Realtime API would give an error if you didn’t specify a name.
• Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, you couldn’t add message translation for your preferred language.

New guides and tutorials

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Highlights

Customizable search UI

You can now customize the conversation list search as part of your theme, to match your own brand’s look and feel. The conversation list search allows users to search for both conversations and messages when using the Inbox pre-built chat UI. 

Components that you can customize as part of your theme include: 

• ConversationListSearchBox
• MessageSearchResult
• NoSearchResults
• SearchResultHeader 
• SearchResultFooter

For more information about customizing your search UI, check out the documentation for these theme components.

More push notification options on the Expo SDK

Are you using the Expo SDK for React Native? Then you now have yet more flexibility when setting up push notifications. In addition to Firebase, you can now also use Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) for push notifications when working with the React Native Expo SDK. You can choose either the expo-notifications or the @react-native-firebase/messaging library for your push notifications. 

For more details on setting up push notifications for Expo, see: Mobile Push Notifications: Expo.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added the option to have multiple secret keys. You can also rotate your secret keys directly from your TalkJS dashboard.
• Added the option to mark a conversation as read or unread via the REST API.
• JavaScript SDK (0.23.0): Added a ConversationRef to fetch and manipulate data about conversations on the Realtime API.
• JavaScript SDK (0.23.0): Added Session.conversation(id: string): ConversationRef to get a reference to a conversation by its conversation ID.
• React Native SDK (0.11.0): Added a scrollToMessage prop to the Chatbox component.
• Flutter SDK (0.13.0): Added a scrollToMessage property to the Chatbox component.

Changed

• Changed the option to get a conversation on the REST API to expose isUnread for each participant in a conversation, to identify whether or not the conversation is unread for that participant.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue with pasting lists into the chat from Google Docs on Chrome on Windows.
• Fixed an issue where scrolling to a specific message didn’t work properly when calling select. 
• Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, it wasn’t possible to run multiple sessions concurrently.
• JavaScript SDK (0.23.1): Fixed ConversationSnapshot.createdAt and ConversationSnapshot.lastMessageAt to be number instead of Date.
• React Native SDK (0.11.0): Fixed an issue where the device token wasn’t registered properly if the Session component was used immediately after the app had been launched.
• Flutter SDK (0.13.0): Fixed an issue where the push notification device token registration didn’t work correctly in release builds.
• Flutter SDK (0.13.0): Fixed an issue where Session.hasValidCredentials didn’t work correctly.

New guides and tutorials 

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Added

• Added an OpenAPI specification for the TalkJS REST API. The specification is available in both YAML and JSON formats for the most recent version (2024-01-01) of the REST API.
• Added a status page where you can monitor the current health status of the TalkJS infrastructure: status.talkjs.com.
• JavaScript SDK (0.22.0): Added the UserRef.set and UserRef.createIfNotExists methods to the RealTime API.
• React SDK (v0.1.9): Added a "use client" banner to build outputs.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue due to which it was temporarily impossible to batch update users using the REST API.
• Fixed an issue due to which the decimal expiry of JWT for authentication didn't work correctly.
• Flutter SDK (0.12.1): Fixed a conflict with the flutter_inappwebview package.

New tutorial

• Add chat to a Next.js app with TalkJS

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Highlights

More secure authentication

Using authentication for your chat helps you protect your user’s messages and data. You can now also enable more secure authentication on your chat using industry-standard JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). 

Token-based authentication is more secure. Because tokens can be set to expire, if a token accidentally gets leaked or stolen, any attacker only has a limited window of time in which they could carry out their attack—giving you the confidence of better protecting your chat data.

The new authentication guide walks you through the basic steps to take to:

• Generate a token
• Pass a token
• Activate token-based authentication on your dashboard

You can also use token-based authentication for the REST API.

Read the authentication guide and further details:

• Security: Authentication
• REST API authentication

Comments theme

Preset themes let you select a complete look and feel of your TalkJS user interface in one go. The new comments preset theme is tailored for any in-app commenting experience, such as for a:

• Text or code editor
• Whiteboard
• Media player
• Collaboration tool

With the comments preset theme, you can seamlessly embed comments, mentions, and reactions into your app. Moreover, using ready-made components, you can customize the commenting experience to meet your exact needs.

You can enable the comments theme directly from the Themes page of your dashboard.

Learn more about the Comments preset theme.

Overview of other changes

Added

JavaScript SDK

0.21.0

• Added support for JSON Web Token (JWT)-based session authentication, adding SessionOptions.token and SessionOptions.tokenFetcher. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

0.20.0

• Added the first aspects of the Realtime API.
• Added UserRef to fetch and manipulate data about users.
• Added Session.currentUser: UserRef to get a reference to the current user for use in the Realtime API.
• Added Session.user(): UserRef to get a reference to an arbitrary user.

0.19.0

• Added the option messageId to Inbox.select.

React SDK

0.1.8

• Added token and tokenFetcher props to Session. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

React Native SDK

0.10.0

• Added token and tokenFetcher props to Session. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

0.9.0

• Added disableZoom prop to Chatbox and ConversationList. This allows you to choose whether the user can pinch to zoom in and out of the UI. By default its value is false and the user can zoom into the UI.

Flutter SDK

0.12.0

• Added token and tokenFetcher properties to Session. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

0.11.0

• Added the enableZoom property to Chatbox.
• Added the sendMessage method to Conversation.

Changed

• Made the ReferencedMessage component customizable in the Theme editor. The ReferencedMessage component renders the contents of the message that is being replied to.

Deprecated

• JavaScript SDK (version 0.21.0): Deprecated SessionOptions.signature. Signature-based authentication will continue to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.
• React SDK (version 0.1.8): Deprecated the signature prop on the Session component. Signature-based authentication continues to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.
• React Native SDK (version 0.10.0): Deprecated the signature prop on the Session component. Signature-based authentication will continue to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.12.0): Deprecated the signature prop on the Session component. Signature-based authentication will continue to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.

Fixed

• Fixed an error where a certain combination of unicode characters in emoticons could cause a page to crash.
• Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, updating a user’s presence (such as by typing, or focusing a window) would result in errors.
• Fixed an issue where performing a search didn’t respect feed filters.
• React Native SDK (version 0.9.1): Fixed a regression with messages not getting marked as read when loading the Chatbox.
• React Native SDK (version 0.9.0): Fixed unnecessary warnings in iOS when calling MessageField methods.

New guides and tutorials

• How to integrate chat into a Framer site with TalkJS
• How to show a system message only to a specific user

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Spotlight

Use custom data to style your chat

To offer all your users a smooth chat experience, you might want to style your chat differently for various user groups. For example, if you run a marketplace, you could enable sellers to use different color schemes. Or in education, you could give each study cohort their own tailored chat style.

Creating dedicated themes is a fast and convenient way to style your chat for different user groups. However, another easy option is to style your theme by passing data to themes. For instance, if you pass a color value as custom data, you can access this value as a custom CSS property in your Theme Editor, and use it to style your chat.

For a detailed guide on styling your chat with custom data, read the latest tutorial: How to use custom data to style your TalkJS chat.

Overview of changes

Added

• Added the SearchResultHeader and SearchResultFooter components to the theme editor, so that they can be customized directly as part of a theme.
• React Native SDK (version 0.9.0): Added a disableZoom prop to Chatbox and ConversationList. With the disableZoom prop, you can choose whether the user can pinch to zoom in and out of the UI. By default its value is false and the user can zoom into the UI.

Changed

• Changed that new users who don’t have a role assigned, have their role set to default. This change only applies to users of apps created after 2024-04-17, and so doesn’t affect existing workflows.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, the app would return an error when deleting a system message.
• React Native SDK (version 0.9.0): Fixed unnecessary warnings in iOS when calling MessageField methods.

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Highlights

Search all messages and conversations

You can now include a search box in your chat, to allow users to search all their messages and conversations. 

If enabled, the search box appears at the top of the conversation list of the user's inbox in the Inbox pre-built chat UI. 

To enable the search functionality, go to the Settings page of your dashboard. In the Search section, check the Search enabled checkbox.

Once you’ve enabled search, all new messages are directly searchable. To also be able to search older messages, select the Index all messages button.

The search messages feature is available on the Growth plan or higher.

Fresh new activity dashboard

With a fresh new Activity overview, it has just become yet easier to analyze chat activity and monitor conversations.

On the Activity page of your TalkJS dashboard, you immediately have an overview of the number of messages sent, active users, as well as conversations created and active. 

You also have direct access to the conversation history of all conversations in your app. To access the details for a specific conversation, select View in the conversation’s row.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added the option to separate email notification replys based on a regular expression (regex). 

Changed

• The sort filter in the TalkJS template language now accepts a key to sort by.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.1): The ConversationList no longer highlights the first conversation by default.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where audio playback would produce a crackling sound when using Android WebView.
• Fixed an issue where voice messages wouldn’t correctly play back on iOS 17.3 and lower.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.3): Fixed an issue where getNotificationHandler was undefined.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.2): Fixed an issue where errors didn’t show up in debug mode.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.2): Fixed an issue where push notifications didn’t work correctly on Android when an app had been terminated.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.2): Fixed an issue where MessageFieldOptions didn’t work correctly.

New guides and tutorials 

• How to integrate chat into your Softr app with TalkJS 
• How to shard a group chat in TalkJS 
• How to customize the popup open and close button 
• How to make clickable tabs for conversations 
• New JavaScript getting started guides by use case: 1-on-1 chat, group chat, and large group chat
• New React getting started guides by use case: 1-on-1 chat, group chat, and large group chat

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Highlight

Control the style of absolutely anything with CSS overrides

You can now style absolutely any aspect of your TalkJS UI, using the global CSS overrides tab in your theme editor. 

Global CSS overrides complement the ability to edit and style chat components. A vast number of parts of the TalkJS UI are currently exposed as components that you can edit directly in your theme editor. However, if that’s not enough, the global CSS overrides tab gives you full control to customize your chat UI. 

For example, with a global CSS overrides you can customize the background of a chat panel however you like, such as by setting an image as the background:

.Panel {
   background-image:url('https://example.com/image.jpg');
   background-size:cover;
}

With the following result:

Chat UI with an image set as the background of a chat panel

Using global CSS overrides, you could for instance also hide the day marker that separates messages sent on different days, by setting DayMarker to display: none:

.DayMarker {
   display: none;
}

The difference between showing and hiding the day marker would be as follows:

Chat UI with and without a day marker 

You can find the global CSS override tab in the Themes section of your dashboard when editing a theme.

Global CSS override the the theme editor of the dashboard

Any CSS styles added to the global CSS overrides section of the theme editor get applied globally, to all parts of the TalkJS UI. To add a style only to a specific component, update that component directly in your theme editor.

For more information, see: Global CSS overrides.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added support for rich text shortcodes in the message editor. Ctrl-B (on Windows) or Cmd-B (on MacOS) now adds markup for bold text, while Ctrl-I or Cmd-I adds markup for italics.
• React SDK (version 0.1.7): Added a show prop to Popup, that allows you to specify whether the pop-up widget pre-built chat UI should be shown or hidden.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Added support for push notifications via Firebase on iOS. Note: For push notifications to iOS on Expo, we currently only support using Firebase, not APNs.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Added onMessage and onUnreadsChange props to the Session component.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Added hasValidCredentials, clearPushRegistration, setPushRegistation and unsetPushRegistration methods to the Session component.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Added support for Firebase push notifications on iOS.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Added compound predicates to Chatbox and ConversationList.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Added a missing themeOptions property in ConversationList.

Changed

• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0) Removed an implicit push notification permissions request. Users of this library must explicitly request for push notification permissions on iOS and Android 13+.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Removed bounce in iOS when the UI reached the edge of the content.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Renamed the AndroidChannel interface to AndroidSettings, and the IOSPermissions interface to IOSSettings.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.1): The ConversationList no longer highlights the first conversation by default.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where a group chat with only guests wouldn’t show usernames alongside messages in the default preset themes.
• Fixed an issue where external links would open inside an app even when Cordova InAppBrowser is used.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Fixed a push notification error when a sender's photoUrl is invalid.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Fixed a build issue on Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 8.0+.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Fixed bug in Session when user synchronization is disabled.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Fixed bug with MessageField.setText and MessageField.typeText that would cause a crash when given certain strings.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Fixed bug where, under certain conditions, the HTMLPanel wouldn’t load.

New guides and tutorials 

• How to set up the Inbox UI mode as a pop-up
• How to create a poll in TalkJS
• Integrate chat into your Bildr webapp with TalkJS
• Integrate chat into a Webflow site with TalkJS

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Highlights

Customizable link previews

You control how TalkJS displays link previews for URLs shared in the chat. For example, you can choose to remove previews for links that contain certain blocked words. And you can now also set whether you prefer your link previews to show up large or compact. 

By default, TalkJS generates a full, large preview for any link that a user shares. However, you can also set your link previews to be more compact.

A large link preview (on the left) and a compact link preview (on the right)

If you’d like your link previews to be more compact, then you can do so by setting the compact parameter of the LinkPreview or LinkPreviews components to true.

Read more on link previews.

Effortless mentions

Mentioning someone in a chat just became more effortless. Users no longer need to manually select, or hit enter or tab to mention another user in a conversation. They can simply type @name and once the user’s name is typed out in full, the chat auto-accepts the first remaining suggested mention. 

A user is mentioned in a conversation simply by writing an @ symbol and fully typing their name

For names that include diacritics, the user can even type the letters without diacritics, and the mention still matches.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added support for sending mobile push notifications using Firebase on iOS.
• Added customizable unsubscribe links to email notifications, to allow users to unsubscribe from email notifications. You can edit the link text. If you’re on the Growth or Enterprise plan, then you can also edit the style and placement of the unsubscribe links in your email theme. 
• React SDK (version 0.1.6): Added an asGuest prop to Chatbox, Inbox and Popup, to enable users to join a conversation as a guest.

Changed

• Changed the behavior of custom message filters and custom conversation filters. You can now also filter messages and conversations for either one custom property or another, rather than only for a combination of custom properties.
• Changed the options for selecting an emoji reaction. If there is enough space for it, selecting an emoji reaction now first shows the emoji reaction favorites bar.

Fixed

• Improved stability and performance for large chats.
  
• Fixed a bug where selecting a conversation in which the user had a draft message would crash the chat.
• Fixed an issue where SMS notifications would not get sent for identical messages sent to the same person within a two-minute timeframe.
• Fixed an issue where push notifications were not sent for large payloads.
• Fixed an issue where ActionButton params wouldn’t update when switching between conversations.
• Fixed in issue where no SVG group chat images were generated for group chats.
• Fixed a bug where, under certain conditions, the message action menu would continue to stay visible even when it wasn’t interacted with.
• REST API (version 2024-01-01): Fixed a bug related to fetching conversations for a non-existing user. Fetching a conversation for a non-existent user now returns a HTTP 404 Not found status, instead of an HTTP 200 OK status.

New guides 

• How to add a hidden user to a TalkJS conversation 
• How to add a ‘Create new chat’ button in TalkJS 

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Highlights

Customizable theme components

The theme editor in your TalkJS dashboard lets you tailor the look and feel of the TalkJS user interface to match your brand style. You can edit the default theme directly, or create your own theme from scratch. 

Each theme comes with a large number of customizable theme components. This includes top-level components such as the chat header at the top of a chat, the user message, and the message field in which users can type messages, or send attachments and voice recordings. It also includes subcomponents that are rendered by a top level component in a theme, such as the user’s avatar and the typing indicator that shows when a user is typing.

Examples of customizable theme components

We’re continuously expanding the range of components that you can customize. Additional UI components will be available to edit soon. 

Read more on customizable theme components.

Powerful feed filters

If you’re using the Inbox pre-built chat UI, you can customize which conversations show up in the conversation list of the user's inbox by using conversation list filters. 

A conversation list with only conversations related to job applications

For example, you can set up a filter to show only conversations with unread messages, conversations that were created or updated within a specific time frame, or only conversations that match a specific string. On top of that, you can filter on specific custom properties, or combine multiple filters all at once.  

You can either use the JavaScript Chat SDK or the REST API to filter conversation lists and select which conversations you return.

Read more on conversation feed filters.

Overview of other changes

Changed

• React SDK (version 0.1.5): Changed to output ES2015.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug in the team_chat preset theme which caused the MessageField layout to display incorrectly.
• Fixed a bug where autoscroll would behave incorrectly under certain conditions.
• Fixed an issue where, on iOS, replying to a message would focus the MessageField but not resize the MessageList, with the result that the keyboard would cover both the MessageField and the ReplyBar.
• Fixed an issue where, when replying to a message that contains a list, the body of the quoted message would be rendered incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue where the message action menu button would stay visible when moving the mouse fast.
• React Native SDK (version 0.7.1): Fixed a regression that would occur when selecting a conversation while onSelectConversation isn’t given. In this scenario, selecting a conversation will now show the TalkJS Inbox Mobile view.
• React Native SDK (version 0.7.1): Fixed a bug where notifications not sent by TalkJS would be displayed twice.

New guides and tutorials 

• How to integrate a chatbot into your TalkJS chat with the OpenAI API
• How to add a custom typing indicator for a chatbot

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