Quick Start

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-05-11 17:25 EDT

This page gets you from zero to productive with chatter in five minutes. Install chatter first if you haven’t already.

Validate a CHAT file

Check a single transcript for errors:

chatter validate transcript.cha

If the file is valid:

✓ transcript.cha is valid

If there are problems, you’ll see rich diagnostics with the exact location and a stable error code. For example, an utterance missing its terminator:

  × error[E304]: Expected terminator not found (line 6, column 1)

 6 │ *CHI:	hello world

  help: Add a terminator at the end: Standard (. ? !), Interruption (+... +/.)

Every error code (E304, E705, etc.) links to documentation with fix guidance.

Validate an entire corpus

Point chatter at a directory — it walks recursively, validates in parallel, and caches results:

chatter validate corpus/

The interactive TUI shows progress and lets you browse errors per file. Use --format json for machine-readable output, or --quiet for CI (exit code 1 on errors).

chatter reimplements the CLAN command surface across validation, analysis, transform, and format-converter categories. A handful of legacy NLP commands (the trie-and-rule MOR/POST/MEGRASP family) are deliberately not implemented — they emit a clear error pointing at Batchalign for the neural replacement. See the CLAN command status matrix for the authoritative per-command counts and per-command status.

Try frequency analysis:

chatter clan freq transcript.cha

Output shows word frequencies by speaker. Add filters:

chatter clan freq transcript.cha --speaker CHI    # one speaker
chatter clan mlu transcript.cha --speaker CHI     # mean length of utterance
chatter clan combo transcript.cha --include-word "want"  # boolean keyword search

All CLAN commands support --format json and --format csv for downstream processing.