Messaging capture (WhatsApp & Telegram)

Dhaga can capture people straight from a chat you already have open. Forward a contact card, a note, or a voice note to the Dhaga bot on WhatsApp or Telegram, reply DONE, and Dhaga creates and tags the contact, keeps every forwarded message as a receipt, and replies with a summary. It's the fastest way to capture from your phone without any app install — hand someone's card straight into your graph while you're still standing at the booth.

This is a core, fully self-hostable feature — it needs no cloud tier. Setting up the bot (the webhook, the API keys) is a one-time admin job covered in Self-hosting; this page is about using it once a channel is connected.

Connecting your chat

There's one bot per deployment, so Dhaga has to know which account a chat belongs to before it saves anything.

1. Open Settings → Messaging (/app/settings).
2. Generate a link token — a short, single-use code that expires in a few minutes.
3. Send that code to the bot as a message. Dhaga links your chat to your account and replies to confirm.

From then on, anything you forward from that chat lands in your graph. A chat that isn't linked yet gets a friendly nudge back explaining how to link it.

What you can forward

• Contact card — a shared vCard becomes a new person (or updates a match).
• Text — a message you type or forward becomes a note, and Dhaga auto-extracts facts from it, each with a receipt back to the message.
• Voice note — stored against the contact (see the caveat below).
• Location or image — kept as a note on the current contact.

How a batch works

Forwarding is positional, so the order you send things in is what Dhaga acts on — no guessing:

• A contact card or image sets the current contact.
• Text and voice notes that follow attach to that contact as notes and facts.
• A leading text with no card establishes the contact on its own, the same way pasted text does in quick-add.
• Forward several cards in one batch and you get several contacts — each one collects the messages sent after it.

Closing a batch

You never have to remember to finish — a batch is saved three ways, and nothing is ever lost:

1. Reply DONE (or finish, end, /done) to save immediately.
2. Start a new forward and any earlier open batch is saved first.
3. Walk away — an idle batch auto-saves after about 15 minutes of quiet (self-hosters can tune this with DHAGA_MESSAGING_IDLE_MINUTES).

When a batch is saved, the bot replies with a summary of who and what it stored so you can open Dhaga and review.

More channels later

WhatsApp and Telegram ship today, but the messaging layer is provider-agnostic: it mirrors Dhaga's LLM and search gateways, so a new channel is a self-contained plug-in with no changes to the capture flow above. If you self-host, see Self-hosting for the per-channel setup.

Next, see how forwarded notes turn into searchable facts in Notes & facts, or bring in an existing address book from Importing contacts.