Hacker News Reader

Comment by kzahel | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't typically give it access to your own telegram account. You use the telegram bot API to make a bot and the claw gateway only listens to messages from your own account

View on HN

That's a very different approach, and a bot user is very different from a regular Telegram account, it won't be nearly as "useful", at least in the way I thought openclaw was supposed to work.

For example, a bot account cannot initiate conversations, so everyone would need to first message the bot, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of giving openclaw access to it then? I thought they were supposed to be your assistant and do outbound stuff too, not just react to incoming events?

Once a conversation with a user is established, telegram bots can bleep away at you. Mine pings me whenever it puts a PR up, and when it's done responding to code reviews etc.

Right, but again that's not actually outbound at all, what you're describing is only inbound. Again, I thought the whole point was that the agent could start acting autonomously to some degree, not allow outbound kind of defeats the entire purpose, doesn't it?

There's a lot of useful autonomous things that don't require unrestricted outbound communication, but agreed that the "safe" claw configuration probably falls quite a bit short of the popular perception of a full AI assistant at this point.

Huh? The bot can communicate with me freely as it sees fit. A "conversation" in telegram parlance is not time-limited, it's ongoing once established, so no it's not only inbound. It can awaken and ping me whenever it wants. This can also work if it's added to a group chat.

If you mean it's not outbound as in it can't message arbitrary random users out of nowhere, well yeah, and that's a very desirable trait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com