Clawdbot: A Platform‑agnostic Personal AI Assistant for Every Chat App

What Is Clawdbot?

Clawdbot is an open‑source personal AI assistant that can live‑stream your conversations on the very apps you already use: WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, and even older extensions like BlueBubbles, Matrix, and Zalo. Its tagline, "Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞", captures a core promise: local, fast, always‑on, and fully under your control.

a. Cross‑platform – Built on Node.js, Clawdbot runs on macOS, Windows (via WSL2), Linux, Android and iOS. A tiny Go‑compiled binary is also provided for quick setups.

a. Multi‑channel inbox – The agent talks on every major messaging surface. Once a message arrives, the gateway dispatches it to an isolated session that can remember context, use tools and even route to other agents.

b. On‑device data – All chat histories are stored locally in a SQLite database unless you explicitly enable an external database. No data is forwarded to any third‑party service.

c. Plug‑in friendly – The architecture is modular: add or replace skills (custom prompts, tools, and handlers) in the skills/ folder or pull skills from the community’s Skill Registry.

d. Live Canvas – A live web‑based UI shows the conversation, state, and can be controlled remotely. The built‑in A2UI host lets you build visual workflows or dashboards.

Why It Matters

Most AI assistants you find on the market require a cloud account: data flows into the vendor’s servers, costs rise, and privacy is compromised. Clawdbot flips the script: everything runs on your own hardware. It turns everyday messaging apps into a single unified chat hub for an AI assistant that can read the web, browse sites, run code, pull in calendar events, and answer you instantly.

For developers, it’s also a playground. The source tree is small, the code is in TypeScript (with occasional Swift for iOS), and the onboarding wizard exposes every configuration knob, from OAuth token handling to sandbox policies.

Quick Install Guide

Prerequisites: Node 22+, pnpm (or npm/bun). Clone the repo and install dependencies.

1. Clone and build:

   git clone https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot.git
   cd clawdbot
   pnpm install
   pnpm ui:build  # compiles the frontend (one‑time)
   pnpm build
   

2. Run the wizard – This step configures your gateway, channels, OAuth, and skills.

   pnpm clawdbot onboard --install-daemon
   

3. It will ask for your preferred model (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) and channel credentials.

4. Start the gateway – The daemon is now up and listening on ws://127.0.0.1:18789.

   pnpm clawdbot gateway --port 18789 --verbose
   

5. Send a test – Open a terminal or use your preferred client.

   pnpm clawdbot message send --to +1234567890 --message "Hello from Clawdbot"
   

6. Chat on your channel – If you set up WhatsApp via Baileys, open WhatsApp, and start chatting with the bot. The first message will trigger a pairing code.

Securing Your Assistant

Clawdbot includes a robust DM policy system. By default, unknown senders receive a pairing code and the bot does not process the message until you approve it.

# Approve a new pair code for Telegram
pnpm clawdbot pairing approve telegram 1234

When you allow a channel to be open, you must explicitly opt‑in to receive DMs from all users, mitigating accidental spam.

To keep your data local and prevent accidental leaks, you should:

• Keep model tokens in a .env file.
• Use sandbox mode for group chats: set agents.defaults.sandbox.mode: "non-main".
• Restrict tool access: allow only browser, canvas, and nodes you trust.

Extending Clawdbot

Skills

A skill is a self‑contained JSON prompt + optional tools. Drop a new directory in skills/ with a SKILL.md and the assistant will discover it. The community already ships dozens of ready‑to‑use skills for code generation, web‑scraping, data retrieval, and creative writing.

Tools

Clawdbot ships with high‑level tools out of the box:

• Browser Control – Drive headless Chrome to fetch pages, take screenshots, and run JavaScript.
• Canvas – Push a live UI to your browser for interactive visual tasks.
• Nodes – Camera capture, screen recording, notifications, and system commands.

You can write custom tools in TypeScript/Swift and wire them to a skill using the tool registry.

Use Cases

Community & Contributing

Clawdbot is maintained by a vibrant community of developers. Contributions come in the form of skills, new channel adapters, documentation, or bug fixes. The project ships a comprehensive CONTRIBUTING.md to make onboarding easy.

Feel free to fork, open issues, or submit PRs. The repo already has 253 contributors, 11.7k stars, and 1.5k forks, proving that the community keeps scaling.

Bottom Line

If you need a personal AI that lives on your own hardware, talks on the messaging apps you use every day, and is fully open‑source, Clawdbot is the answer. Its flexible onboarding wizard, robust security model, and rich extension system make it trivial to bring an AI to your everyday workflow without sacrificing privacy or speed.

Ready to dive in? Clone the repo and start the onboarding wizard today – your local AI assistant is only a few commands away.