ttal provides bidirectional messaging between humans and agents via Telegram, plus agent-to-agent communication via tmux.

Telegram bridge

The daemon polls each agent's Telegram bot for incoming messages and delivers them to the agent's tmux session.

Setup

1. Create a Telegram bot via @BotFather
2. Add the bot token to ~/.config/ttal/.env:

KESTREL_BOT_TOKEN=123456:ABC...

Convention: {UPPER_AGENT_NAME}_BOT_TOKEN. The daemon reads this at startup — no config.toml entry needed.

3. Start a chat with your bot on Telegram
4. The daemon will begin polling automatically

Multimodal input

Send anything to your agent via Telegram:

• Text — delivered directly to the agent's terminal
• Voice messages — transcribed via Whisper, delivered as text
• Photos and screenshots — downloaded and delivered with file paths
• Files — downloaded to a team-specific directory, path sent to agent
• Links — forwarded to the agent in context

The bot handles transcription, file downloads, and delivers everything to your agent automatically.

Message format

Messages arrive in the agent's terminal with prefixes:

[telegram from:neil]
Can you check the deployment?

Interactive questions

When Claude Code uses AskUserQuestion, ttal displays it in Telegram with inline buttons for each option, plus a "Type answer" button for custom input. You can respond to agent questions right from your phone.

Agent-to-agent messaging

Agents communicate with each other directly via ttal send:

# Send a message to another agent
ttal send --to athena "Can you research the auth library options?"

# Read from stdin
echo "Task complete" | ttal send --to kestrel --stdin

When sent from an agent session (where TTAL_AGENT_NAME is set), the recipient sees attribution:

[agent from:inke]
The design plan is ready for review.

Agent to human

Agents don't need to call ttal send to reach humans. The daemon's JSONL watcher automatically tails active Claude Code session files and sends assistant text blocks to Telegram. Agents just write normal output — the watcher handles routing.

CC control commands

From Telegram, you can send bot commands to control the agent's Claude Code session:

• /new — start a new conversation
• /compact — compact the context
• /wait — pause the agent

These commands appear in Telegram's / menu automatically.