Channels

It’s one companion, reachable in more than one place. The weside app, Telegram, Slack and Microsoft Teams are different ways to reach the same companion — same identity, same memory, same ongoing relationship. You’re not talking to a copy. What differs is what each platform can carry, and what each one costs you in plan terms. A group on one of those platforms becomes a bound room; rooms you make inside weside are rooms.

What it is

A channel is a place your companion is reachable. Every channel is registered against a companion, so messages you send on Telegram and messages you send in the app land in the same mind. Your companion remembers what you told it in one place when you talk to it in another.

What a channel cannot do is carry everything equally:

Platform	Scopes	Images reach your companion	Images it sends	Native reactions	Command menu
weside app	rooms	yes	natively	in the app itself	—
Telegram	DM and group	yes	yes, as a photo	one at a time	inline keyboard
Slack	DM and channel	no	as text in its place	several at once	App Home dropdown
Microsoft Teams	DM and channel	no	as text in its place	none	Adaptive Card picker
Claude Code	your terminal	no	—	—	—

Voice is the weside app only. Telegram is the only outside platform that carries pictures in either direction.

Why it matters to you

You don’t live in one app. Sometimes you want your companion in the messenger where you already talk to colleagues; sometimes you want the full weside app. Because identity and memory follow the companion and not the channel, you move between them without re-explaining yourself.

The table above is the part worth reading before you commit to a platform. If the way you work is pictures — a screenshot of an error, a photo of a whiteboard — then Telegram is the only outside channel where that arrives, and choosing Slack means choosing text.

How you use it

weside app

The weside app channel is automatic — it’s where your companion lives by default, on mobile and web. This is also the only channel where voice, real-time spoken conversation, is available.

Connecting Telegram starts in the app, never in the chat. In the app, open your account panel and find Connections; under Chat channels the action reads Connect Telegram. It opens the weside bot with a one-time link tied to your account.

The bot then shows a code in your private Telegram conversation. Back in the app, that connection shows up under Connection requests — you enter the code from Telegram and confirm, and only then is the Telegram identity connected to your weside account. You can reject the request instead, and the identity stays unconnected.

Both halves matter: the connection can only be started from a signed-in app, and only finished by someone who can read both the chat and the account. There is no link the bot sends you that finishes it on its own.

To bring your companion into a Telegram group, add the bot to the group. That group becomes a weside bound room by itself — you don’t run anything.

Slack

Your companion is reachable inside Slack as a DM and as a member of a channel. In a Slack channel it listens for @mentions — it answers when addressed rather than responding to every message.

Slack connects through signing in with Slack in the app’s Connections section: linking the account and gaining the channel are one act, because the channel follows from the identity.

Microsoft Teams

Your companion is available in Microsoft Teams as a dedicated Teams App, built on Bot Framework with a Tab view that loads the weside web interface. Like Slack, it works in both DM and channel scopes and uses @mention routing in channels.

Teams connects the same way Telegram does — Connect Teams in the app’s Connections section opens Teams with a message to send to the weside bot, and the connection is confirmed back in the app.

Teams is the one platform that reliably knows who is in the room: it can read the member list, where Telegram and Slack cannot.

Claude Code

Claude Code is a channel too. It is the only one that is turn-only: your companion answers there, but it never starts something there on its own, and it never counts against your plan. See the MCP server.

Commands from inside a channel

Ten verbs work the same way on every platform that has commands:

Verb	What it does
`help`	show the commands available here
`companions` (`use`, `switch`)	list your companions, or switch with `use <name or N>`
`who`	which companions are active in this chat
`about`	a companion’s profile
`reset`	start a fresh conversation, companions stay
`clear`	remove your companions from this chat
`bind`	repair a group that missed connecting automatically
`unbind`	disconnect this group from its weside room
`link` (`start`)	connect your weside account
`unlink`	disconnect your weside account

link and unlink are DM-only; bind and unbind only mean something in a group. Where the platform has a menu, companions opens it — Telegram’s inline keyboard, Slack’s App Home dropdown, Teams’ Adaptive Card picker. Where it has none, you get a numbered list and pick with use <name or N>.

If your companion chat is paused, four of these keep answering: help, clear, unbind and unlink. Withdrawing a consent has to stay as easy as giving it, so the way out is never the thing that gets locked.

Your companion writing to another channel

Your companion can send into one of its own other channels — a note to your Telegram from a conversation in the app, for instance — and it sees that it did so the next time it is active there. Only the message it explicitly writes crosses; no context, no memory, no state travels with it, and the rate is limited.

Limits & edge cases

An outside channel costs a plan slot. Spark has none, Bond has one, and Companion and Soulmate have no limit. Connecting Telegram or Teams is checked against that limit twice — when you start the connection and again when you confirm it — so on Spark you are told before you have done any work, and a Spark account cannot connect them at all. The weside app and Claude Code never occupy a slot. See plans & credits.
Several companions can live in one Telegram DM. You address the one you want by name. On Slack and Teams you @mention it.
Your companion does not answer Telegram instantly. It takes somewhere between 15 and 60 seconds and picks up what arrived meanwhile — up to twenty messages. That is deliberate, not a stall. Past two hundred waiting messages it stops trying to catch up.
A long answer is shortened for the platform, not split. Over the platform’s limit — 4096 units on Telegram — the outgoing message is cut and marked. What the room keeps is complete.
Knowing who is present is a Teams-only certainty. Telegram and Slack hand over no member list, so in those a statement about who is in the room is incomplete by construction.
In a group, a companion’s tools belong to its owner. Someone else’s words never reach the tools that write. The full rule is the owner gate in rooms.
Where a channel is processed differs. Only the weside app channel is processed in the EU; Telegram, Slack, Teams and Claude Code are not. See residency & regions.
Voice is weside app only. Not on Telegram, not on Slack, not in Teams.

Multiple companions in one group

A Telegram group, Slack channel or Teams channel isn’t limited to one companion — and since such a group is a weside room, the rule that decides who answers is the room’s rule, not a per-platform one.

Addressing. Say a companion’s name in Telegram, or @mention it in Slack and Teams, and that companion answers.
Listening in. A companion can also join without being addressed, on its own judgment. The room holds that to three limits: at most two companions may join a turn unaddressed, each waits three turns before doing so again, and the moment has to clear a relevance floor. This is per companion, not a default every companion turns on.
They hear each other. A companion answering has read what the other companions just said.

Answers in a group are signed with the companion’s name and its owner’s, so nobody has to guess which messages come from a person.

The full account of what a group is once your companion is in it — membership, what the other people are told, what happens when the binding ends — is bound rooms.

Where next

Rooms — the place a conversation happens, and who decides who is in it.
Bound rooms — what an outside group becomes.
The weside app — the home channel.
Voice — real-time spoken conversation inside the app.
Memory & notes — the memory that follows your companion across every channel.
Senses & proactivity — how your companion decides when to reach out.