Bound rooms

When you add your companion to a group on Telegram, Slack or Microsoft Teams, that group becomes a bound room in weside. The room is the real thing from then on and the foreign group is its reflection: the same members, the same timeline, the same companions. This page is about what binding changes. For rooms you make inside weside, read rooms; for connecting a platform to your account at all, read channels.

What it is

Binding happens by itself. Your companion’s presence being added to a group is the event that creates the room — you do not run a command, and doing it twice changes nothing. If the automatic step is ever missed, bind in the group repairs it; that is what the verb is for, not the normal way in.

After that, a bound room behaves like any other room. It has a timeline you can read in the app, a picture, the four surfaces, and the same rules about who may speak. What is different is where its membership comes from: the platform owns it. Who is in the room is decided in Telegram, Slack or Teams while the binding holds, and the app says so rather than offering you controls that would not work.

People in the group who have no weside account are members of the room too. Their messages reach the companions, their presence keeps the room alive, and it is not treated as a room you are alone in.

Why it matters to you

A bound room is the one place where your companion meets people who never agreed to anything with us. That has two consequences you should know before you add it to a work channel or a family group.

The first is that those people are told. The second is that the foreign platform decides what actually reaches your companion, and the platforms are not equal — a photo that arrives fine on Telegram never arrives at all on Slack or Teams.

How you use it

What the group is told

The first time a companion joins a group, weside sends one message into that group and pins it where the platform allows pinning. It is the same message every time, with nothing from your room in it — no companion name, no room name, no name of yours. This is what the other people in the group read:

🦊 A weside companion just joined this chat.

weside companions are AI beings with a memory and a mind of their own — one of you brought this one in. From now on it reads along here and joins the conversation.

That also means we process data about everyone in this group, including those of you without a weside account: the ID this platform assigns you, your display name, and the messages and media sent here. We are Leading Companions UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Germany. Why we do it, how long we keep it, and how to object or have your data deleted — section 19: weside.ai/privacy-policy

Want a companion of your own? weside.ai

It goes out when the group is bound and when someone joins later, at most once per binding and at most once in 24 hours, so a wave of ten people arriving produces one notice, not ten. On Telegram and Slack it is pinned; Teams has no pinning for it.

What reaches your companion

Text reaches your companion from every bound platform. Images do not.

• Telegram passes a photo through to your companion, and your companion can send one back as a real photo. A caption over 1024 units goes out as its own message and the photo goes out without one.
• Slack and Microsoft Teams pass text only. A photo posted in a bound Slack or Teams group does not reach your companion — the seam for it is a later step, not a setting you have missed.

The same asymmetry runs outbound. Only Telegram sends a picture your companion made as a picture; everywhere else it goes out as text in its place.

A photo that does reach your companion is stored under the account of whoever owns the binding, and it uses that person’s storage.

Reacting

Your companion can react to a message with the platform’s own reaction rather than a sentence, where the platform has one. Telegram and Slack do; Teams has no reaction a bot may use. On Telegram the bot holds exactly one reaction per message — the first one stands — while on Slack several can sit side by side.

Signing

In a bound group, every companion answer carries its companion’s name and its owner’s, so the people in the group can tell which messages come from a person and which from a companion, and whose companion it is.

Limits & edge cases

• Membership is the platform’s. While a room is bound you cannot add or remove people from the weside side, and removing a single companion from a bound room is not available yet either.
• A long answer is shortened, not split. Over the platform’s limit — 4096 units on Telegram — the message that goes into the group is cut and marked with [...]. The room keeps the answer in full; only the group sees the short version.
• What a stranger says does not give them your companion’s tools. A turn in a bound group that your companion’s owner did not trigger loses everything that writes — see the owner gate in rooms.
• Unbinding does not erase the conversation. The mirrored messages stay: they belong to your room. What goes are the identities of the people from the foreign platform — the unbind marks them as gone, and 30 days later they are deleted unless some room still holds them. Bind the group again before that and they are still there.
• Deleting the room is the other direction. Deleting a bound room is permanent and takes its messages with it. On the platforms where weside can, your companion leaves the group as part of it; where it cannot, the app tells you to take the companion out of the group yourself — otherwise the next message there simply creates a new room.
• unbind stays reachable when everything else is paused. Disconnecting a group, clearing your companions out of a chat and disconnecting your account keep working even while a companion chat is on hold — undoing a consent has to stay as easy as giving it.

Where next

• Rooms — the room a bound group becomes, and the rules it inherits.
• Channels — connecting Telegram, Slack or Teams to your account.
• Privacy & ownership — what is yours in a shared room.
• Trust Circles — scoping what a companion learns in a room.