How to communicate between channels

[jilees]

Hi!
Got a couple of questions about sending message to channels.

1. Is there a way to send message to channel from shell command? Like
   openclaw message send --channel <channel_name> --target <target_id> --message "Hi from console"
   in openclaw? I try to send notification from daemon and cannot guess how(
2. Is there any way to communicate between two different channels? I've got two channels, one of them is voice with answer shortener prompt injection. I'd like to ask "send details to Telegram" or something like that.
   Thanks!

[anubhavaanand]

I looked through the code for both of these. The honest answer is that one is possible today and the other isn't, at least not in the shape you're hoping for.

From the shell: there's no message send equivalent right now. picoclaw agent only takes -m, -s (session, default cli:default), --model and -d, and it always prints to stdout — the CLI path hardcodes the channel as cli and the chat as direct, and it builds the channel manager empty, so a standalone picoclaw agent process doesn't have any channel workers to send through in the first place. The gateway's HTTP listener doesn't help either: it only serves /health, /ready and POST /reload, plus the per-channel webhooks. Nothing accepts a message and a destination.

The one shell command that actually carries a destination is cron:

picoclaw cron add --name deploy --message "deploy finished" \
  --channel telegram --to 123456789 --every 60

With two caveats I'd want you to know before building on it. There's no one-shot option, only --every/--cron, so you'd delete the job afterwards. And a running gateway reads <workspace>/cron/jobs.json only at startup — the scheduler loop never re-reads it — so a job you add while it's running won't fire until you restart. Also, --deliver in docs/reference/cron.md doesn't work at the moment: the payload kind is hardcoded to agent_turn, so every job goes through the agent rather than being posted verbatim.

If you just need a daemon to raise a notification, calling the Telegram Bot API directly is going to be less fighting than routing it through picoclaw.

Between two channels: yes, this one exists, and it's the message tool. It takes content plus channel, chat_id and reply_to_message_id, and it's enabled by default (tools.message.enabled). Those destination fields default to the session the turn came in on, but they can be set to anything, and delivery goes out through the channel manager — so your voice agent can post into Telegram in the same turn. Just ask it something like "…and send the details to Telegram, chat 123456789".

Two things to keep in mind for that to work smoothly. You need to name the chat id: there's no name-to-id lookup, so "send to Telegram" alone leaves the model guessing (your id is the value in channel_list.telegram.allow_from, or you can get it from a getUpdates call). And the Telegram channel has to be configured and running in the same gateway process. allow_from doesn't restrict outbound, only inbound, so you don't have to add the voice user there.

Worth mentioning since it's related and currently missing: the message tool can't be pointed at another channel from the cron tool, because that one has no channel/chat_id parameters at all — only the CLI does. So "check this every morning and post the result to Telegram" from inside a chat isn't something the agent can set up today, and heartbeat has the same restriction since it always replies into the last channel the gateway saw.