WhatsApp integration share some experience

I just wanted to share my experience with the whatsApp-Integration made by Guiseppe Castaldo (big thanks bro!!!).

So why should I prefer Guiseppes WA-Integration or CallMeBot?
CallMeBot is good to send Messages at predefined numbers. New Numbers needs register for the service and needs to be registered everytime in the configarion.yaml WA-Integration can address new numbers on the fly and can also address groups.

So why should I use WA-Integration instead of Green-API or other WhatsApp-Services? These services use basically the official WhatsApp-API for Business. If you want to use this, you give basically full control over your WhatsApp account to thirdParty service. Whereas the WA-Integration is basically a remotecontrol of the WhatsApp for Web Interface. So basically you can do the same as you can in the WhatsApp for Web GUI. But both of them are able to address GroupChats.

  • Installation works perfectly as described in the readme.
  • For the easiest examples check the How to use which worked perfectly out of the box!

So no lets get a little deeper…

  • I intended to send some URL into a chat. But the Interface is breaking always, once the message text contains any URL (tested different ones, always same behaviour).
  • If you want to use functions not documented in the HowTo, it helps to unterstand, that Guiseppe made use of the Baileys-Framework (Big thanks to these guys!)
  • originally I wanted to send a GMAPS-Link(URL). But as this was buggy, so I checked up the Bailey documentation which was really helpful.

In the message-section you find all sorts of messages with descriptions of its parameters.

So I also found out e.g., that I can send a location with only the address name:

  - data:
      clientId: default
      to: [email protected]
      body:
        location:
          address: "Madison square New York"
    action: whatsapp.send_message

Hope, I could help some user of that Add-On to spare some time. And hopefully someone more experienced than me, can fix that issue with the broken URL-sending out of this fabulous Add-On.

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I am using this integration since some months and I really like it, thanks Giuseppe!
I registered on Whatsapp a spare SIM I had naming it Home Assistant and with HA Logo as picture so when I receive messages from the integration it is looking like HA is writing me :smiley:

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