Connect your first channel in five minutes

Setting up an agent has two halves. The first is deciding what it should be, which takes as long as you want. The second is putting it somewhere you will actually talk to it, which should take about five minutes. This is the second half.

Before you start

Have these ready and the whole thing is uninterrupted:

• The messaging app you want it in, on the device you normally use it on.
• A decision about who is allowed to message the agent, which you set during setup.
• Two minutes of not switching apps, because a couple of the flows involve scanning a code.
• Nothing else. There is no server to provision and no webhook to host.

The flow itself

From your agent's page, open Channels and pick one. Telegram and Discord hand you a guided connect. WhatsApp offers a QR scan or the Business route. Slack, Mattermost and Matrix follow the same shape. Every one of them ends with a test message, and that test message is the point: do not consider a channel connected until you have seen a reply arrive in the app itself.

Once it answers, set the allowlist. This is the step people skip and later wish they had not, because it is what decides whether the agent responds to anyone who finds it or only to you and the people you name. Each channel handles this slightly differently, and the per-channel guides walk through the exact screens.

The two places people get stuck

First: an agent that connects but never replies is almost always an allowlist question, not a connection one. Second: a QR scan that expires mid-flow just needs restarting, and restarting it costs nothing. Neither is a sign that something is broken, and both look identical to a real failure, which is why they are worth naming.

A channel is connected when a message you sent from your own phone comes back answered. Not before.