**By:** webdevel@sparkhausmedia.com (Anonymous User (Linux Magazine))
© Lead Image © Dena Friesen
To impress his WhatsApp friends, Mike Schilli builds a chatbot in Go that contacts OpenAI on demand and provides answers.
It was many, many years ago, in 2009.
At the time, I had been working for Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California, for quite some time as a software engineer.
At that time, the colleagues in my group came up with the idea of building a messenger app and giving up their well-paid jobs and health insurance at Yahoo! to join a newly founded startup company.
I laughed and politely declined because the company seemed doomed to failure to me, even though I knew my colleagues were very capable people.
To keep a long story short, they named the new company WhatsApp, it took off like a rocket, and just five years later, Facebook (now Meta) paid around $19 billion for it.
That catapulted my former colleagues into the Olympus of California’s richest people.
If I had joined them back then, all that would be left for me to do today would be sponsoring charity events (and that wouldn’t be much of a life!) – also, so much for my ability to predict the future of IT.
Today, WhatsApp has almost completely replaced good old email in many people’s private lives.
Unfortunately, Meta does not provide an API solution for the messaging service.
In this case, as usual, the open source world steps into the breach: The community has developed a Go library [1] named whatsmeow.
It can be used to build arbitrary applications based on WhatsApp web communications (WhatsApp in a web browser).
These applications can join real chats and send and receive messages.
This is no trivial matter, because WhatsApp messages are still end-to-end encrypted.
The only exception: As soon as a conversation participant says @Meta AI, the Facebook bot is allowed to join in, read along, and respond using artificial intelligence.
[…]
Sys admin Charly likes to keep up with the state of his domestic strawberry plants, so he has outsmarted WhatsApp to allow status messages to be sent through the service from a PC or Raspberry Pi.
The Tox protocol uses file-sharing techniques for messaging and audio-video chats, which gives users a greater degree of privacy and freedom.
The messenger app Jami offers clients for all popular operating systems and promises maximum anonymity for chats, as well as voice and video calls, by dispensing with central servers.
The electronic brain behind ChatGPT from OpenAI is amazingly capable when it comes to chatting with human partners.
Mike Schilli picked up an API token and has set about coding some small practical applications.
The Fyne toolkit offers a simple way to build native apps that work across multiple platforms.
We show you how to build a to-do list app to demonstrate Fyne’s power.
Once again the Arch User Repository is plagued by a high volume of malicious packages.
If you’re a fan of Alpine Linux, it’s time to upgrade because the latest version has been released with KDE Plasma 6.6, Gnome 50, and Linux kernel 6.18 LTS.
Comprehensive measures adopted by the European Commission aim to reduce dependency on non-EU countries.
Within growing security and skills gaps, AI has been found to be a positive driving force behind tech hiring trends in Europe.
A new open source portal seeks to coordinate and scale open source efforts across the United Nations system.
KDE Linux developers have dropped the Arch User Repository from the build pipeline due to security concerns; other distributions should consider doing the same.
After backlash from the Linux community, California may be backing off on its promise to force all operating systems to verify age, but one platform may still have to comply.
Qualys has discovered a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that can be used to elevate standard user privileges.
Ubuntu Core 26 could be a game-changer for organizations looking for increased security and reliability.
AI is giving Linus Torvalds a headache, but not in the way you might think.
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**📚 Original Source:**
[An AI Bot Responds in WhatsApp Chats](http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2026/307/Meow-Meow)
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