WhatsApp agent
A WhatsApp agent is an AI agent reachable through the WhatsApp Business API. It listens for inbound messages, replies in your account's voice, and can send rich attachments (images, PDFs, voice notes, location pins). For most non-US markets it is the dominant messaging surface.
Why it matters
WhatsApp passed two billion monthly active users in 2024 and is the de facto SMS replacement in most markets outside the United States. For a personal AI agent that wants to be where its users already are, the WhatsApp surface is non-negotiable in any country where iMessage and SMS aren't dominant. India, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, most of Europe, much of Africa: WhatsApp is the universal inbox.
The technical surface is richer than SMS. WhatsApp supports images, PDFs, voice notes, location pins, replies-as-quotes, message reactions, typing indicators, read receipts, and a 1500-character soft cap that comfortably handles paragraph-level replies. An agent that can render markdown (asterisks for bold, underscores for italic, single backtick for inline code) reads naturally to a human eye in WhatsApp's chat bubbles.
The hard part is the operational layer. WhatsApp Business API requires an account approved through Meta's review process, a verified business phone number, and a template-message workflow for outbound campaigns (free-form sends are session-bound by 24-hour windows). For most developers this is delivered through a service provider (Twilio, MessageBird, 360dialog, the Meta Cloud API direct), each with subtly different quirks.
How Ajeris handles this
Ajeris uses Twilio's WhatsApp integration. Inbound messages arrive at the gateway, route to your per-user agent, and respond on the same thread. Outbound replies render bold as single asterisks (Twilio's render quirk), strip markdown that does not translate, and respect the 1500-character soft cap by archiving long replies to a signed URL. The agent supports inbound media: images get vision-processed by Claude, PDFs are extracted as text, and voice notes are transcribed. See the tour for the cross-channel demo, or the multi-channel agent page for how WhatsApp stitches into SMS, voice, and the rest.
