Other channels

Web, Telegram, email, and Slack are the four channels covered in detail elsewhere. This chapter is about the rest.

SMS

Text messages, the boring kind. Useful for:

• Capture from places where Telegram doesn’t work well (poor connection, locked-down phone, recipient who doesn’t use Telegram).
• Quick reminders that need to reach a phone reliably.
• Notifications for goals or follow-ups where you’d rather have an SMS than a push notification.

Setup involves connecting an outbound SMS provider (we support Twilio at the time of writing). You get a number from the provider, paste credentials into Jootle, and the channel works.

Limit, honestly

SMS as an inbound channel (text-it-to-talk-to-your-AI) is still being matured. Outbound SMS (your AI texts you) works reliably. Inbound replies route through but can drop on international SMS depending on the provider’s coverage. For now: outbound first, inbound experimental.

WhatsApp

The setup is similar to Slack: a WhatsApp Business API integration that gives your AI a WhatsApp identity. Useful for:

• International customers and contacts whose default chat app is WhatsApp.
• Cross-border conversations where SMS gets expensive or unreliable.
• Customers in regions where WhatsApp is the primary text channel.

Limit, honestly

WhatsApp is planned and partially implemented as of this chapter. The WhatsApp Business API has nontrivial onboarding (Meta’s verification flow), so we’re rolling this out per-customer rather than as a one-click integration. If WhatsApp matters to your use case, ask support to walk you through.

Voice

Voice has two sides:

Inbound voice (you speak, your AI listens):

• Telegram voice notes work today. Hold-to-record, send, your AI transcribes and treats as a normal message. Reliable; most customers use it.
• Browser-based speech-to-text in the web app works in browsers that support it. Quality varies by browser.
• Dedicated phone-call voice (call a number, speak to your AI live) is on the roadmap but not shipped.

Outbound voice (your AI speaks to you):

• Available on Telegram via voice notes if you ask: “Send replies as voice notes when I’m in a car.” Your AI synthesizes audio and sends.
• Outbound on dedicated phone calls is not yet supported.

For now, voice mostly means “Telegram voice notes”. They’re enough for most use cases.

Webhooks

For developers or power users: outbound webhooks let your AI post to any URL when a goal fires or a follow-up condition is met.

Use cases:

• Pipe a daily summary to a custom dashboard.
• Notify an existing internal system when a Jootle event happens.
• Trigger a build, post to a status page, kick off a workflow.

Webhooks are configured per-goal (or per-follow-up). The body is JSON; the schema is documented in the developer reference.

Inbound webhooks (an external system POSTs to a Jootle URL to fire a goal or update an entity) are also supported, with authentication via HMAC signature validation.

Voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, Google Home)

We get asked. The short answer: not yet. The longer answer:

• Alexa and Google Home support custom skills, but the latency and consent model make them awkward for an always-on assistant.
• Siri shortcuts on iOS can be set up by motivated customers to forward voice commands to Telegram, which lands them in Jootle.
• A first-party voice assistant skill is not a near-term priority. We’d rather make Telegram voice notes great than build a Siri skill that’s not great.

RSS and atom feeds (read-only)

You can ask your AI to subscribe to an RSS feed. New items appear in your AI’s context and can trigger goals.

“Watch the Jootle changelog RSS feed and ping me when there’s a new release.”

“Monitor my industry’s news feed and produce a weekly digest.”

These are passive monitors. Setup is a one-liner in chat.

”Custom” connectors

Beyond the prebuilt connectors, the platform supports building your own. The most common patterns:

• An API your business uses that doesn’t have a prebuilt Jootle connector.
• A legacy system you want your AI to talk to.
• A specialized tool (a CAD system, a payment processor, a sector-specific SaaS).

Custom connectors live in toolkits. The dev-facing reference is in the JTF format docs for now (technical, not customer-facing). The handbook chapter Building your own toolkits covers the model in plain terms.

If you don’t have a developer on the team, we (Jootle) can build a custom connector with you on a paid basis. That’s consulting work, not a standard package. Reach out via the contact form.

Choosing the right channel for the job

The thing to remember: you don’t choose channels per task; you choose per moment. A driving moment is a Telegram moment. A focused-work moment is a web moment. A “I just got an email” moment is an email moment. The same assistant, the same knowledge, the right shape for where you are.

Don’t agonize over which channel “owns” a project’s chat. Use whichever channel you’re in. The conversation accumulates in the same place either way.

What’s next on the channel roadmap

Without committing to specifics, the prioritization is roughly:

1. WhatsApp. Real WhatsApp Business onboarding for customers who need it.
2. Inbound SMS reliability. Make the experimental inbound SMS a first-class channel.
3. Native iOS / Android app. Better than the web app on phones for capture-on-the-go. Possibly displaces Telegram as the default mobile channel for many customers.
4. Phone-based voice. Call a number, talk to your AI live.

This roadmap shifts based on what customers actually use. If you want to vote for one, tell us.