Budgie Chat

Considering that up until now, most of the UI was prototype code not meant to be visible to the public eye, we set out to get a better, consistent UI for the landing page and rest of the product. After about 3 weeks of ad-hoc time spent on it, we finally got our fresh landing page up built with NextJS and hosted by Netlify.

Took some tinkering but figured out a powerful way to integrate Budgie within Microsoft Teams. The user experience to use Budgie within Microsoft Teams feels very smooth, with just 3 clicks you can have a video message in your team members' channel or chat.

No begins the slow process of getting it approved for the MS Teams marketplace.

I did a closed launch on a local Slack community. Not many new signups but after doing a demo of the product got some constructive feedback on features and functionality that can be useful. Here the idea of transcribing the audio messages was born. This added the major feature of being able to search for messages based on the contents of the video message. The other main point was also integrating with Microsoft Teams and not only slack.

This is also where the we first decided on the name "Budgie" . It was called async-chat until now.

Played around with standard browser javascript features, and set up a basic Firebase project. Built a very basic Slack bot which only has 1 response message; a unique link to start a video message recording and drop it in the slack channel where you left off.

We're a small agency and most of our team works different times of the day on different projects. Being a big fan of products like Marco Polo and Bonjoro, I realised it could be a massive benefit to our team to have something similar integrated within our company communication tool - Slack and MS Teams.