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IntroductionCore conceptsChannel

Channel

A channel is the surface a user uses to reach an agent. The agent’s brain stays the same; the channel changes how the user gets to it.

Out of the box, every agent is available through the TeamMate chat in the web app. That’s the channel you see when you click New Task in the sidebar. From there, you can put the same agent on:

  • Slack — message it in a DM or in a channel where it’s invited.
  • Microsoft Teams — same idea, on Teams.
  • WhatsApp — through a Twilio number.
  • Email — each agent can have its own inbox; emails turn into chats.
  • Voice — inbound phone calls through Twilio, or AI voice calls via Vapi.
  • Web embed — a chat bubble you drop on your website or product.

How channels work

Each channel has a connector that translates messages back and forth between the channel’s native format and TeamMate’s internal format. From the agent’s perspective there’s no difference between “user sent ‘hello’ from Slack” and “user sent ‘hello’ from the TeamMate web chat” — the message goes into the same conversation, the agent replies, and the connector turns it back into a Slack message.

This is why one agent can serve many channels at once. Hashim might be live in TeamMate web chat, on the company’s #sales-help Slack channel, and on a Twilio WhatsApp number — three surfaces, one set of instructions, one conversation history per user.

Channel vs interface

These two get confused:

  • A channel is where the user types — Slack, Teams, voice, email, web.
  • An interface is a structured input on top of chat — a form with named fields that gets converted into a chat message.

You can have both: a form interface in the web app that sends to an agent which is also available on Slack and WhatsApp.

Where channels are configured

In the agent builder, the Channels tab. Each channel has its own row with connect / disconnect controls and per-channel settings — e.g. for Slack, which workspace to install into; for email, the desired inbox address; for WhatsApp, the Twilio number.

Some channels need a workspace-level setup first (Slack, Teams, Twilio) — connect once in Settings → Connected Apps, then enable per agent.

Auditability

Every message coming in through every channel lands in the same workspace audit log. You can see “this Slack message from Sara was answered by Hashim” the same way you’d see a web-chat conversation.

Task vs workflow vs triggerInterface