# Watercooler chat **URL:** \ **Category:** Project help\ **Tags:** text-to-speech\ **Created:** [March 22, 2019, 1:53pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/watercooler-chat/5714 "2019-03-22T13:53:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![imrehg](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/balena/user_avatar/forums.balena.io/imrehg/32/36_2.png) [@imrehg](https://forums.balena.io/u/imrehg)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2019, 1:53pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/watercooler-chat/5714/1 "2019-03-22T13:53:27Z")
The Balena team is remote-first, and almost all of us are working remotely. That has a lot of upsides, but there are also some downsides, such as most communication going on in the team chat. Thought I put together a small project that makes it feel more like having a watercooler discussion going on nearby, to have a more “lively” environment even for those who are remote. Not sure if I’ve succeeded with the environment, but here’s the project nonetheless 😜 A demo of the result is in this video. The speakers are connected to a Raspberry Pi 3, that runs the project, while in the left corner there’s my laptop and the regular chat notifications. When there’s a message (and you listen to the video with voice enabled 🔊 ), you will hear most messages read out: [![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rYKOME1WNXc/maxresdefault.jpg "Balena Watercooler Speaker") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYKOME1WNXc) The voice is pretty robotic, and would have to tune it for sure to be less creepy 👾 but the basic concept seems to work with our chat system. When recorded the video it wasn’t a very busy time, it will be interesting to keep it running more in the future. The code is here: > **[balena-io-playground/balena-watercooler](https://github.com/balena-io-playground/balena-watercooler)** > > Watercooler discussion for remote teams. Contribute to balena-io-playground/balena-watercooler development by creating an account on GitHub. It’s using a node.js library to talk to our chat system, and uses [Festival](http://www.festvox.org/) for speech synthesis. What do you think? Would your own team like a robotic watercooler? 🤖 ---
**Author:** ![chrisys](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/balena/user_avatar/forums.balena.io/chrisys/32/1731_2.png) [@chrisys](https://forums.balena.io/u/chrisys)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2019, 11:42pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/watercooler-chat/5714/4 "2019-03-25T23:42:43Z")
Cool stuff @imrehg 😃