When you’re starting out streaming, chatters can be few and far between. This can leave you constantly watching an empty chat while you also try to perform in your game or activity. In order to build your viewership it is important to engage with chatters immediately so that they do not move on to another more interactive streamer. 

Never miss a new chatter again with our new, customizable sound notifications, built into our Chat Box widget. Not only can you show your chat activity on stream, but now you can set up customized sound notifications for new chat messages. 

Settings 

To set up Chat Notifications, you will need to set up the Chat Box widget, which can be found here. For full details of how to use Chat Box, see our set up guide for Chat Box.

Tips

Tip 1: we recommend unchecking the setting “Shutdown source when not visible” in the widget browser properties for Chat Box. This ensures that any timed settings are not interrupted when changing scenes, and the chat does not get cleared when changing scenes.

Tip 2: we recommend adding the Chat Box source to all of your scenes to ensure that you always hear the chat notifications. If you do not have the Chat Box source on a scene, you will not hear the notifications when you are on that scene. Tip: You can always place the Chat Box below other sources like BRB or gaming scenes if you do not wish to show the chat on those scenes, but still want to receive the sound notifications. 

Tip 3 (for all widgets): always add your widgets as existing sources instead of as new. This ensures that you do not hear any duplication of sounds. 

Sound

You can customize the sound you’d like to hear when you receive a new message in chat by selecting a stock sound or uploading your own. You can also customize how loud you would like the sound to be by adjusting the volume slider. 

Default Cooldown 

Chat notifications come with a default 5 second cooldown. This cooldown only allows new sound notifications to come in when a message is received at least 5 seconds after the previous sound notification. This default simply prevents spamming of the notification sound.

Trigger Threshold

The trigger threshold setting is a unique setting which allows you to customize how much time you would like your chat to be quiet for before you receive a notification sound for an incoming message.

For example, if I set my trigger threshold to 30 seconds, that means that I will not hear a notification sound until my chat has had no new messages for at least 30 seconds

• I hear a notification on my first message of the stream
• Chat continues to be active without a break of at least 30 seconds, and I do not hear any notifications as I engage with my active chat.
• Chat activity stops at some point, and there are no new messages for at least 30 seconds.
• When a new message comes in, I hear a notification sound. 

If you’d like to only hear notification sounds when your chat has been quiet for extended periods of time, simply increase the trigger threshold setting. You can set the trigger threshold anywhere from 5 seconds to 10 minutes.

And that's it! You can now relax and focus on your game or activity knowing that you'll be notified when a new chat comes in.