Jessica Chat

Live customer care chat for gamers. Customers sign in with Google, email/password, or as a guest; a password-protected agent inbox lets a support team reply in real time (via polling), with typing indicators, sound alerts, and image uploads on both sides. Every reply shows to the customer as "Jessica" regardless of which agent actually sent it.

• Customer chat: /support
• Agent inbox: /agent

Stack

• Next.js (App Router) + Tailwind v4
• Postgres via Neon (@neondatabase/serverless)
• Vercel Blob for uploaded images
• Auth.js for customer login (Google + credentials)
• Stateless signed-JWT cookies for agent sessions (jose)
• PWA (installable to a phone home screen) with a manual "Add to phone" prompt

Realtime updates are done by short client-side polling (every ~2s), not WebSockets/SSE — chosen so this runs correctly on Vercel's serverless functions without needing a separate realtime service.

Local development

npm install
vercel env pull   # pulls DATABASE_URL, BLOB_STORE_ID, etc. from the linked Vercel project
npm run dev -- -p 3005

Required env vars (see .env.local, gitignored):

Var	Purpose
DATABASE_URL	Postgres connection string (Neon)
BLOB_STORE_ID	Vercel Blob store (image uploads)
AUTH_SECRET	Auth.js session signing
AGENT_SESSION_SECRET	Agent login session signing
AUTH_GOOGLE_ID / AUTH_GOOGLE_SECRET	Optional — enables "Continue with Google"

Agents

Two default agent accounts are seeded automatically on first login attempt:

Username	Password	Name
agent1	agent1pass	Agent 1
agent2	agent2pass	Agent 2

Add another agent:

node --env-file=.env.local scripts/create-agent.mjs "Agent 3" agent3 aStrongPassword

Deploy

Connected to Vercel — pushing to main deploys to production automatically.