MessageAnalyser

If you want to "analyse" your DMs for whatever reason, eg. seeing how many times more you send compared to someone else, then this program is for you. MessageAnalyser's purpose is to aggregate messages from (possibly multiple) sources into one DataFrame that can be used for all sorts of analysis.

It isn't that easy to set up, but it's sort-of interesting to view. Also, be warned: it's really slow.

Also, do remember that "analysing" your messages, at least, in my opinion, bears no "scientific" meaning. It's more for "wow, this graph/number looks interesting" than actually making friendship decisions. That being said, this is licensed under a free software license, so I can't stop you from using this "scientifically," but I don't recommend it.

Right now, MessageAnalyser can analyse data from

• Discord
• Telegram
• iMessage
• Google Hangouts
• SMS (only Android, although iPhone SMS might work through iMessage on Mac)

Matrix support will probably be added in the future.

I'm lazy, so I didn't actually write any chat exporters. You have to do this manually with separate tools.

Exporting

Discord

To get a CSV file for Discord, use the wonderful DiscordChatExporter from Tyrrz. If you're using the GUI version (as I am, even under Linux---by using wine), make sure to set the date format to dd-MMM-yy hh:mm:ss tt. In Discord, the identifier is your username.

iMessage

Use this tool: https://github.com/aaronpk/iMessage-Export. Generate a CSV from your chat.db. I don't use contact names, so I am not sure if the identifier changes if you do, but for me, the identifiers are not equivalent to the SMS identifiers—you need a + at the beginning of the phone number. If it's an email it's just the other person's email address.

Telegram

This one is really easy. Just go to your DM, click the three dots, and click "Export chat history." Uncheck any media attachements (this program only analyzes text), and then max out the "Size limit" slider. Make sure you export the entire chat history, but you can change it to whatever you want and MessageAnalyser will only analyse whatever you supply it with.

Hangouts

Get the Hangons chat exporter Hangons chat exporter and download the Hangouts export from Google Takeout. Import the Hangouts.json file into Hangons, and then select the "simplified JSON" format as the output format. Download the hangons.json file that it provides, and then select that in the MessageAnalyser GUI. The identifier is the name of the conversation. You can see a list of conversations contained in your Hangouts.json either by going to Google Hangouts and looking at the names of your chats, or you can also select a different output format in Hangons and look at the titles before the file extension (eg. if you select the CSV output format and you "Bob Smith.csv," then your identifier would be "Bob Smith").

SMS

Install the SMS Backup & Restore app (it's nonfree, which is extremely unfortunate—I will try to find a better one in the future). Go into the app, click "Back Up Now" and deselect the "Call logs" option. Then, choose an appropriate backup location. It doesn't matter where you back up to as long as you can download the XML file this app generates to the computer where you're running MessageAnalyser. The identifier is the a phone number, with no dashes or + at the beginning. For example: 15417543010 would be a valid identifier.

Usage

1. Get into the Julia REPL and install all the required packages. You can simply do julia -q --project and then paste this in: import Pkg; Pkg.instantiate(). It might take a while to install everything since there are plenty of dependencies. Once this is done, simply type in exit() to exit the REPL.
2. Once this is done, you can just run julia src/MessageAnalyser.jl, which will open up a GUI. Load in all your message histories---you can load in messages from multiple different sources and platforms and MessageAnalyser will stitch them together for you. Once this is done, click Analyse to view the graphs and the word count ratio for your overall message history. You can also click Save to save your entire (stitched-together) chat history as an HTML file. The HTML file does not have a lot of CSS, so it doesn't take that long to load even if the chat history is long (compared to Hangons Backup or the DiscordChatExporter HTML).

Future Tasks

• Explain the graphs
• Add frequently/infrequently used words
• Add Hangouts support
• Detect conversation starting