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": "[email protected]"
}

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.