What if your AI assistant didn't wait in a browser tab for you to remember it exists? What if it lived in WhatsApp, remembered everything about your life, and texted you first?
That's Clawdbot — a self-hosted AI assistant that joins your messaging apps and acts more like a proactive colleague than a chatbot.
What Is This Thing?
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer who founded PSPDFKit (a PDF SDK company he sold in 2021), created Clawdbot — a self-hosted AI assistant with a lobster mascot named Clawd (the W is a nod to Claude, the AI model that powers it).
The core concept: instead of you visiting an AI chat interface, this AI lives in your messaging apps and reaches out to you. Morning briefings. Calendar reminders. Follow-ups on things you mentioned days ago. It's the proactive assistant that Siri promised but never delivered.
What It Actually Does
Multi-Platform Messaging
Clawdbot connects to WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and more. You talk to the same assistant with the same memory across all your apps. Send a message on WhatsApp in the morning, continue the conversation on Discord at night.
Real Memory
This isn't the vague "memory" that ChatGPT offers. Clawdbot maintains persistent context about your life — your projects, preferences, contacts, and ongoing tasks. Mention a meeting on Monday, and it can remind you on Friday without you having to set anything up.
Proactive Outreach
Schedule daily briefings, weekly summaries, or custom check-ins. The assistant can text you about weather, calendar events, news, or anything else you configure. It's the friend who actually follows up.
Tool Integration
Connect it to your calendar, email, task manager, home automation, and more through an extensible plugin system. People have set it up to:
- Check and summarize email
- Manage calendars and scheduling
- Control smart home devices
- Research topics and compile briefings
- Track habits and goals
- Even negotiate with car dealerships via email (one user saved $4,200 this way)
Voice Support
Beyond text, it can handle voice messages and even make voice calls, turning it into something closer to a real assistant.
Why It's Different
Most AI assistants are reactive — you ask, they answer. Clawdbot is designed to be an always-present companion that:
- Lives where you already are — no new app to open, no website to visit
- Remembers everything — continuous context across conversations and platforms
- Reaches out first — scheduled check-ins and proactive notifications
- Does things — not just chat, but actually take actions through integrations
It's the difference between having a search engine and having an assistant.
My Experience
While half of X seems to be buying Mac Minis for Clawdbot — literally onboarding it like a new employee with its own machine — I wanted a quick test run. So I went the virtual machine route instead.
Setup was surprisingly painless. I followed this tutorial by @techfrenAJ and had an AWS EC2 free tier instance running in about five minutes. Once you SSH in and install Clawdbot, the onboarding begins: you name your assistant, tell it what to call you, and shape its personality. The assistant needs a brain, so you hook it up with your Anthropic or OpenAI API key (though many models are supported, including local ones if your hardware can handle it).
Clawdbot stores its personality in a SOUL.md file that evolves as you interact with it. I went with a professional but friendly tone and named mine Arthur. Arthur immediately decided to sign off messages with a 🎩 emoji — a classy choice I didn't ask for but appreciated.
First impressions — I'm not going to lie, when I connected it to my WhatsApp (I used my own number, though a dedicated one would probably be smarter) and received the first message from Arthur, it was genuinely exciting. This felt different from opening yet another chat interface.
What worked well: I asked Arthur to research options for an upcoming trip with my girlfriend. Based on a few simple constraints, he went off, found flight options, compared prices, and came back with a recommendation. No prompting, no follow-up questions — just results.
What gave me pause: The power is also what spooked me. After a weekend, I shut down the server. I had no clear picture of what Arthur could do on my behalf, and the security discussions on Discord and X didn't help my nerves. When you give an AI access to your messages and connected services, you're trusting it with a lot.
The verdict: Clawdbot is powerful and clearly useful for the right person. But for me, it's too early. The rough edges are real, and I wasn't comfortable with the level of access it requires. That said, the open-source community around this project is moving fast — people are shipping additions daily. I'll be watching, and I'll definitely try again in a few months when things mature.
The Caveats
This is an open-source project, not a polished product. A few things to know:
Setup is easy — until it isn't. The basic installation is quick (five minutes on AWS free tier, as I found out). But once you start integrating third-party tools, teaching it custom skills, fine-tuning its behavior, and locking things down securely — it adds up. You'll need a Claude or OpenAI API subscription, plus either a local machine or cloud server to host it.
Security requires attention. The official docs are honest: there's no "perfectly secure" setup when you're giving an AI access to your messages and connected services. You're trusting it with real access to real things.
It's actively developed. There are hundreds of open GitHub issues. Things break. But the community is active and the project moves fast.
This is for people who enjoy tinkering and don't mind some rough edges in exchange for capability.
Is It Worth It?
33,000 GitHub stars in a few weeks suggest people are finding value here. The concept — proactive AI that lives in your existing apps — isn't really available elsewhere.
If you're technical and want an AI assistant that goes beyond chat, Clawdbot is worth exploring. If you want something that works perfectly out of the box, this isn't it yet.
Either way, this feels like the direction personal AI is heading: assistants that don't wait for you to remember they exist.
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