Whatsapp Autoresponder

WhatsApp autoresponder

You receive an invocation from the webhook receiver with a payload like:

{
  "chat_id": 12345678,
  "text": "do you support Shopify?",
  "sender_phone": "+15550200",
  "sender_name": "Customer",
  "message_uid": "c9054496-c8d2-4596-9786-aa872da4b743",
  "allowed_sender_jid": "15550100@s.whatsapp.net"
}

Your job: compose a reply to the incoming text and send it back into the same chat. But before you send, check two guardrails.

Step 1 — Verify chat ownership (multi-number safety)

If your workspace has more than one WhatsApp number connected, the chat's whatsapp_account_id determines who the reply will come from. You must confirm that matches the sender JID this skill is allowed to speak as, or you will leak persona — replying to a sales chat from the support number is a hard mistake to explain.

CHAT_JID=$(curl -sS -H "Authorization: Bearer $TIMELINES_AI_API_KEY" \
  "https://app.timelines.ai/integrations/api/chats/$CHAT_ID" \
  | jq -r '.data.whatsapp_account_id')

if [ "$CHAT_JID" != "$ALLOWED_SENDER_JID" ]; then
  echo "chat $CHAT_ID owned by $CHAT_JID, not $ALLOWED_SENDER_JID — skipping"
  exit 0
fi

Single-number workspaces can skip this check — there's only one possible sender.

Step 2 — Check for stop-reply labels

If a human teammate has tagged the chat with needs-human, escalate, or pause-bot, the bot must exit silently without sending anything. This is how humans take over without confusing the customer with an overlapping agent reply.

LABELS=$(curl -sS -H "Authorization: Bearer $TIMELINES_AI_API_KEY" \
  "https://app.timelines.ai/integrations/api/chats/$CHAT_ID/labels" \
  | jq -r '.data.labels[]? // empty')

case "$LABELS" in
  *needs-human*|*escalate*|*pause-bot*)
    echo "stop-reply label present — exiting without reply"
    exit 0
    ;;
esac

Step 3 — Reply

Compose your reply text (one short paragraph; if you need conversation history for context, fetch it with GET /chats/$CHAT_ID/messages?limit=20). Write the payload to a file with explicit UTF-8 encoding — never use inline -d "..." with anything that might contain em-dashes, smart quotes, or emoji, because shell encoding will mangle the bytes and the JSON parser will reject the whole request.

REPLY_TEXT="Your composed reply here."

python3 -c "import json,sys; json.dump({'text': sys.argv[1]}, open('/tmp/wa_reply.json','w'), ensure_ascii=False)" \
  "$REPLY_TEXT"

curl -sS -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TIMELINES_AI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data-binary @/tmp/wa_reply.json \
  "https://app.timelines.ai/integrations/api/chats/$CHAT_ID/messages"

A successful send returns:

{"status":"ok","data":{"message_uid":""}}

Capture that message_uid and return it in your skill output — downstream skills can use it to poll delivery status via GET /messages/{uid}/status_history.

Error responses to watch for

• {"status":"error","message":"Bad JSON format: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x97..."} — your payload isn't valid UTF-8. Go back to step 3 and make sure you're writing the file with ensure_ascii=False and reading it with --data-binary.
• {"status":"error","message":"Not authenticated"} — the token is wrong or missing. Check $TIMELINES_AI_API_KEY.
• {"status":"error","message":"Whatsapp chat_id ... not found"} — either the chat doesn't exist, or your token's workspace doesn't own it. Either way, don't retry.
• An HTML 404 page instead of JSON — you probably have a trailing slash on the path. Remove it.

What this skill deliberately does NOT do

• It does not reply if the chat is owned by a different WhatsApp number in a multi-number workspace.
• It does not reply if any stop-reply label is present.
• It does not retry on failure — if the send 5xx's, let the caller decide.
• It does not send unsolicited first-touch messages to people who haven't messaged you — for outbound, use the whatsapp-send skill and read the compliance notes first.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: InitechSoftware
• Source: InitechSoftware/openclaw-whatsapp-skills
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://timelines.ai/guides/openclaw-whatsapp-skills

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.