Could we make chat apps cringe? Introducing Cringe Chat

AI is everywhere these days, so it’s not exciting anymore. I recently realized that what feels exciting to us is not some magic generated by a computer, but rather things that are imperfect and human.

This is why I created the library human-replay which captures how people type and then replays it in the same way, with all the typos, corrections, and pauses. It brings back a sense of humanness that we now miss in our daily interactions.

Since I now had the tools to capture and replay human typing, I started wondering what fun application I could build with it. And I thought: wouldn’t it be cringe af if, when chatting with someone online, you could see exactly how they typed their messages?

Here comes Cringe Chat.

To prevent abuse and bad behavior (this is only an experiment), you need to know the username of the person you want to chat with. You can easily test it in two different browser windows. You can also use the “Connect to self” button to see how you type your own messages.

The project was built with FastAPI and uses WebSockets and human-replay under the hood.