Amarbot connected to WhatsApp

Sep 23, 2022 • Yousef Amar • 1 min read • Parent project

As of today, if you react to a message you send me on WhatsApp with a robot emoji (🤖), Amarbot will respond instead of me. As people in the past have complained about not knowing when I'm me and when I'm a bot, I added a very clear disclaimer to the bottom of all bot messages. This is also so I can filter them out later if/when I want to retrain the model (similar to how DALL-E 2 has the little rainbow watermark).

The reason I was able to get this to work quite easily is thanks to my existing Node-RED setup. I'll talk more about this in the future, but essentially I have my WhatsApp connected to Matrix, and Node-RED also connected to Matrix. I watch for message reactions but because those events don't tell you what the actual text of the message is that was reacted to was, only the ID, I store a small window of past messages to check against. Then I query the Amarbot worker with the body of that message and format and respond with the reply.

This integrates quite seamlessly with other existing logic I had, like what happens if you ask me to tell you a joke!