How to Run Your Own AI Assistant Across WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord

How to Run Your Own AI Assistant Across WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord Most people interact with AI through a web browser. You open ChatGPT, type a question, get a response, and move on. But what if your AI assistant lived inside the apps you already use — WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, even iMessage? That's the idea behind OpenClaw , an open-source project that connects Claude AI to your everyday messaging apps. You run it on your own machine, you control the data, and you talk to it wherever you already communicate. I spent a weekend setting it up. Here's what I learned. Why Self-Hosted? Before diving into the setup, let's address the obvious question: why bother running your own AI assistant when ChatGPT exists? Three reasons stood out to me: Data stays on your hardware. Every conversation goes through your machine. Nothing gets stored on a third-party server you don't control. Multi-channel access. Instead of switching between apps, the same assistant is available on WhatsApp