Whatsapp to Google Sheets

A Chrome extension to transfer incoming whatsapp messages to a Google Sheets

Problem:

With wave 2 of Covid, a lot of systems are collapsing in India and people are helping each other out. One of the person’s personal whatsapp got forwarded as the helpline number and people started sending help pleas on it.

Throughput: 50+ Whatsapp Messages / hour at peak times.

Since only 1 whatsapp login is allowed, a single volunteer was understanding and writing all data in Google Sheets from where other people can pick up cases and help these people out. We wanted to save Time & Efforts for this volunteer manually entering this message 24/7. Also it was really exhausting for that 1 person to do this as whatsapp stopped giving OTPs due to multiple requests and it could only be logged into that account.

Solution:

Research: Nothing available on Zapier or anywhere else as this is a personal whatsapp account. For getting a Company account so that we can use Whatsapp APIs through partner, it will take quite some time.

We decided to make a chrome extension and use Whatsapp Web on a computer and keep it active at all times. Extension will scan for any incoming message and send it to our server to which will parse this text and get meaningful data from it and store in Google Sheets.

8 hours and 3 people (Aman Kumar, Archil Srivastava & Me) collaborating remotely, we came up with the solution. :)

This is on my personal whatsapp but you get the feel. Extension rotates through the top 20 users and send their last 20 messages to the server.
And this data when ran on Helpline whatsapp goes into Sheet as below.

Parses the messages for Name, City, State, Category (Hospital Bed, Injection, Plasma, Oxygen) and dumps it into sheet.

Me and our Team are available for any help needed in this Crisis times. If anyone needs this or any such solution, please reach out to me at me@abhinavrai.com and I will build / set it up for you.