Inspiration
I bet a week’s worth of free rides to Taco Bell that my friend would come to school today with the same hoodie he’s been wearing for the last few weeks. We wanted to turn these friendly inside jokes into a game. The best part? As you become more conscious about your habits, you start to break them, encouraging you to turn something predictably into something new. Today, my friend wore a hoodie that he had in his closet but never actually wore!
What it does
Called It is an AI bot that lives in your group chat and runs playful bets with free, fictional chips.
- Observe. It goes through the chat’s history and keeps up with new texts to understand the small habits that have become inside jokes within the group chat.
- Predict. Everyone then gets a private DM with a yes-or-no bet and stakes chips based on how confident they are in their answer. The person the bet is about gets a decoy bet about someone else, so nobody really knows who the round is about.
- Settle. A proof photo and a message settle it. The AI judges the proof, the results land in the group chat, and if the target does what most people bet against they earn a bonus as well (as a reward from being unpredictable).
At the end of each week, whoever has the fewest chips gets a dare that the group chat decided at the beginning of the week to try something new, like going outside and making a friend of the first person they see.
A companion app shows the live room, chip balances, the pot, an activity timeline, and each result to really gamify the experience.
There is no real money anywhere. All the chips are play money with no cash value.
How we built it
- Photon Spectrum is the host. It receives group and DM messages and sends the bot's replies. The group chat runs on Telegram.
- Snowflake is the brain. Every message is stored in Snowflake, and Snowflake Cortex plans each bet and its decoy from the chat, writes the messages, reads what players mean, and judges the proof.
- Capital One's Nessie is the rail. Each player and the pot get a sandbox account, and every stake and payout is mirrored there as a withdrawal and a deposit.
- Flutter powers the companion app, built in a Frutiger Aero style with frosted glass, glossy buttons, and bubbles. It reads everything from a small Node and TypeScript API.
Challenges we ran into
- Running one round across a group chat and several private DMs at once, without leaking who the target is.
- Making the money add up in every case, including ties, refunds for the decoy, and the target bonus.
- Keeping bets fun and harmless, so the host only picks habits and never anything personal.
- Testing a game that normally takes days. We wrote a seeded chat history so we could run rounds in minutes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- We felt incredibly proud when we ran a full round from the bot being added to the group chat to it sending out the payments.
- The decoy and the payout for doing something unpredictable were things that we felt proud of thinking of, since we felt it really rounded out the game and made it fun for everybody involved at all times.
- The fact that none of the tools we used felt forced; rather, they all provided the perfect solution for what we needed.
What we learned
- How to build an agent that acts in a real messaging app instead of just a chat window.
- That, however cliché this is, the fun comes from the secrecy and the reveal (the process), and not from the chips (the destination).
- How much design actually goes into a game.
What's next for Called It
- The ability to run in iMessages. We know we can do this; we just need the Enterprise version of Photon.
- More bet types, like group goals and steaks.
- A season-long leaderboard, with a place for a community outside of your group chat to post their best dares.
