HeartBeatAgents

Channels Guide

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Deploy your agents across five communication channels. One agent, every platform this covers today.

Channels are the communication platforms where your agents interact with users. HeartBeatAgents supports five today: Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, and the built-in web chat. A single agent can be deployed across every one of them simultaneously, delivering consistent, context-aware responses wherever it's connected.

How Channels Work

  1. Navigate to Settings → Integrations → Channels in your dashboard.
  2. Select the platform and complete authentication (bot token, API key, or webhook secret depending on the platform).
  3. Configure platform-specific settings (which workspace channels to monitor, which phone number to use, etc.).
  4. Assign one or more agents to the channel.
  5. Your agent is live. Messages flow in, responses flow out.

No code, no webhooks to configure manually, no infrastructure to manage.

Supported Channels

Team Messaging

Slack. Bot token authentication, webhook-based delivery. Your agent appears as a Slack bot in any channel or direct message, responds in threads, and supports slash commands.

Discord. Bot token authentication over WebSocket. Your agent joins your Discord server as a bot user. Discord's real-time WebSocket connection means immediate response with no webhook delay.

Customer Messaging

Telegram. Bot token authentication, webhook delivery. Your agent becomes a Telegram bot, messaged directly or added to groups, with full Telegram Bot API support.

WhatsApp. API key authentication over the WhatsApp Business Cloud API, webhook delivery.

Web

Web Chat. The built-in chat interface in the HeartBeatAgents UI itself. Real-time, streaming communication over WebSocket, with JWT authentication at connection time. This is the same infrastructure that powers the browser UI, not a separate embed.

Beyond these five

Email and SMS are available as integrations an agent can act through (drafting and sending a message as one step in a task), not as a persistent inbound channel the way the five above are. See the Integrations Guide for what an agent can do with those services.

Multi-Channel Architecture

When an agent is deployed across multiple channels, each channel maintains its own conversation threads. A customer reaching out on WhatsApp and the same customer messaging later on Slack have separate conversation histories, but the agent's long-term memory is shared across all channels. Context learned in one conversation is available the moment that same person reaches out on another channel. One agent, one memory, every connected touchpoint.

Channel-Specific Behavior

Agents adapt their output format to match each platform's conventions: thread-aware replies on Slack and Discord, interactive elements where WhatsApp and Telegram support them, streaming Markdown on Web. No configuration needed: the agent reads the channel context and adjusts automatically.

  • Core Concepts: how channels fit alongside agents, tools, memory, and voice
  • Voice: real-time spoken conversation, a separate feature from these five channels
  • Integrations Guide: connecting external services beyond communication channels