Deploy & run
Channels
The inbound channels — email, Telegram, WhatsApp, web forms, and the widget — that can start an agent run.
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Channels are the ways people and systems reach an agent from outside the platform. Each channel is really just a specific trigger wired to start a run, so this page is a map of how each one gets there.
Inbound email
You can point an inbound email address at an agent. When a message arrives, it starts a run with the email's contents (and any relevant thread context) as input. This is a good fit for support-style agents that triage or reply to incoming mail.
Telegram
Connect a Telegram bot to an agent. Messages sent to the bot start a run, and the agent's response is sent back through Telegram. Useful for internal tools or lightweight customer-facing bots where your users already live in Telegram.
Same shape as Telegram: connect a WhatsApp number to an agent, and incoming messages start a run whose reply is delivered back over WhatsApp.
Web forms
A web form submission can start a run directly, with the form fields passed in as input. This is useful for intake flows — a lead form, a support request form, an application form — where you want an agent to act on a submission immediately.
Embeddable widget
The embeddable widget is a chat interface you drop into your own site. Each message a visitor sends starts a run, and the agent's reply streams back into the widget. This is the closest channel to a live conversation, versus the fire-and-forget shape of email or a form.
How each maps to a run
Every channel above is a trigger: an inbound event that starts a run using the same agentic loop, approval gates, and billing gate described in running agents. The channel only decides how input arrives and how output is delivered — it doesn't change how the run itself executes.
Channels sit alongside webhooks, polling, and cron schedules as trigger types. If you need a run to fire on a schedule or in response to a system event rather than a person, see triggers and schedules.
Related
- triggers and schedules — webhooks, polling, and cron-based triggers
- running agents — how a triggered run executes
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