Show HN: WhatsApp MCP Server

Show HN: WhatsApp MCP Server(github.com)

229 points by lharries 1 year ago | 138 comments

Hi HN – I built an open-source, self-hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for WhatsApp: https://github.com/lharries/whatsapp-mcp

It connects to your personal WhatsApp account via the WhatsApp Web multi-device API (using whatsmeow from the Beeper team), and doesn't rely on third-party APIs. All messages are stored locally in SQLite. Nothing is sent to the cloud unless you explicitly allow your LLM to access the data via tools – so you maintain full control and privacy.

The MCP server can:

- Search your messages, contacts, and groups

- Send WhatsApp messages to individuals or groups

Why build this?

99% of your life is stored in WhatsApp, by connecting an LLM to WhatsApp you get all this context. And your AI agent can execute tasks on your behalf by sending messages.

nzach 1 year ago |

There is any reason why you choose to build a Python wrapper for a Golang binary?

I've been playing around with mcp-go[0] and it seems pretty good.

[0] - https://github.com/mark3labs/mcp-go

lharries 1 year ago | |

Mainly that I'm more familiar with Python — you're correct however that MCP Go would be a good way to go if I do a bigger refactor

oulipo 1 year ago |

BTW is there a good "WhatsApp API SaaS" open-source server? There's Waha https://github.com/devlikeapro/waha which is nice, but unfortunately they don't offer "safety features" in the open-source version to lock the access

I guess it's solvable with Tailscale though

MatiasPerez 1 year ago |

I just use vambe.ai, 14 days free trial too

gabll 1 year ago |

I don’t know if whatsmeow was intended for this use case: imagine a LLM performing multiple calls in a short period of time, could you risk to have your whatsapp account blocked by Meta?

d3m0t3p 1 year ago | |

Apparently this is the case: https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow/discussions/199

kinduff 1 year ago | | |

I've been running and using a puppeting bridge [1] for my Matrix instance for more than 4 years with 3 different numbers and no problem at all.

The controls they have in place are probably based on behavior, rather than on access.

[1]: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

vdfs 1 year ago | | |

WhatsApp will ban you if it detect any kind of automation, if you use this or an other wrapper you will -very luckily- get banned, even without making calls. They want you to use their paid business API

jeroenhd 1 year ago | | |

Good to know WhatsApp is at least somewhat proactive against scammers.

lharries 1 year ago | |

It saves the messages in a local SQLite database on load — so querying shouldn't be an issue as it doesn't contact the WhatsApp server. For sending, this does use the API however and needs more caution

rndmio 1 year ago |

The why is because we can, but damn am I finding the tools being built with, or having tacked on, AI depressing. Is this a small glimpse of the future we're building for ourselves? Communication is valuable because thought and effort went into it, lowering the bar on producing content doesn't mean more choice, it means lower quality. Already I see a reaction against this amongst some peers when they find out something they were asked to review was AI generated, why should they put effort in if the other person didn't.

stavros 1 year ago | |

If we find the "thought and effort" part of communication valuable, we'll keep it. If not, we won't.

kevindamm 1 year ago | | |

That would be a fine posture to take, very naturally-selective, but I find it discomforting because I've seen so many different ways that humans act that don't benefit them (individually or on the whole). It isn't always out of self-destruction or lack of self-preservation. More often than not, the choice was based on what's easiest -- a tendency towards the path of least resistance. This technology looks a lot like trading off intention, and attention, for quick and good-enough(?) results. Enough so that I can understand GP's concern for our communication skills as a society.

I think we could find ourselves losing the "thought and effort" in spite of it being more valuable, because many people find it easier. Or that even those who continue on with it, despite it not being easier, are broadly labeled as a bot because their writings failed the vibe check.

I have confidence that there will always be small communities that continue holding this as valuable, but that maintaining it in a community setting will become more strained as the general zeitgeist drifts in the direction of regarding output higher than effort.

andrewmi 1 year ago |

Looks interesting. It would be nice to see something like this for all the communication methods in Beeper unified together. That way all communication is covered rather then just 1 app of many.

astorphobis 1 year ago | |

Beeper is actually built on top of an open source protocol called Matrix, and they also open sourced all of the bridges, so you can host beeper yourself and connect the LLM to it. And even better - since the protocol is open source, you can also connect to the official Beeper server! You can even use alternative Matrix clients to connect to Beeper, I do this on my company laptop since Beeper is blocked. https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

saberience 1 year ago |

I think this is like the 7th or 8th WhatsApp MCP implementation.

I really have zero understanding why people think this is something crazy. It’s not. It’s importing the official MCP packages and wrapping basic API methods with an MCP tool decorator.

You can even ask Claude or ChatGPT to make your MCP tools for you and they will write this same code in 1 minute.

I can’t wait until the community realizes that MCP servers are literally just regular methods with a one line decorator and these posts just get downvoted for being incredibly low effort.

It’s basically the same as upvoting someone saying “hey guys, I wrote a method which connects to the WhatsApp API”, that’s it, really.

enoughalready 1 year ago | |

I've been struggling to understand the hype as well.

I think the excitement is more around seeing how MCP is being embraced, and the impact it can have. Rather than me having to wire up a bunch of tools by hand, I can now point to some configuration files and MCP servers.

I think it's fair for people to be excited, but ultimately, yes, your prediction is correct, and it won't be as exciting after MCP becomes a standard. This is similar to any new technology. e.g. years ago, Go programs and literature were popular on this site, but not so much any more.

soulofmischief 1 year ago | |

Yeah. I've written infrastructure for LLMs to use Twitter, Discord, WhatsApp and more since '22 before GPT 3.5 was even out. You can imagine my contempt for all of this right now.

That said, MCP might be here to stay for a while as a stopgap for reducing duplication of engineering work.

CarlitosHighway 1 year ago | |

You know why: MCPs are still a hot topic, and WhatsApp is ubiquitous (unfortunately).

samastur 1 year ago |

Cool work, but I'm more fascinated by your claim "99% of your life is stored in WhatsApp...".

Not even remotely true for me even if it would encompass all messaging apps I use. I guess I'm just an old introvert, but it makes me wonder how life looks like for those for whom it is true.

thegreathir 1 year ago |

If this thing is connected to someone's WA and I ask "Who is your girlfriend?", the AI theoretically could list all the chats, read some messages in each chat, determine who could be the partner and return the name to me :)) I can go ahead and ask "What was the last fight about".

lbeurerkellner 1 year ago |

Please be aware that MCP has severe security risks associated: https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-tool....

linux_devil 1 year ago |

I am not sure about how other Whatsapp MCP servers build , but I like the design here : Go server to integrate with Whatsapp , scan the QR etc which acts like a bridge and lightsql to store some data APP MCP server : To interact with the data , app and LLM

Mystery-Machine 1 year ago |

Thank you! I live in Latin America and here WhatsApp group chats are through the roof. I easily receive several hundreds of messages across various group chats. It's not possible nor healthy to read every single message. It would be great if the tool could summarize all the unread messages from the given group chat. I played around a bit with the MCP server and it was having problems to even get the correct group chat. The group chat name could be stored together with the ID in SQLite and, if matched, it should immediately query for messages from that group chat, skipping the need to listing chats and trying to find the correct group chat and, worst of all, failing.

ofirtwo 1 year ago |

Why was Go necessary here? couldn't it just be a whole-python project?

lharries 1 year ago | |

whatsmeow is in Go. Potentially I could have used a gopy instead and done it all in python (or just done it all in Go)

sunshine-o 1 year ago |

By the way, I was just searching for a way not to have the WhatsApp app on my phone while limiting the risk of third party software and/or have my number banned.

Is there a way to login on WhatsApp Web on a server and then proxy or scrape the messages to send them to my phone?

sharmasachin98 1 year ago |

Really cool project, the privacy-first angle and self-hosted design are a huge plus. Curious: have you run into any rate limits or session issues with the whatsmeow API, especially when used continuously by agents?

tobyhinloopen 1 year ago |

This is incredibly cool, thank you

ocBuilder 1 year ago |

what I'm most shocked about is that people choose whatsapp and the like for "end to end encryption" then open a window to small companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

siva7 1 year ago |

So lovely. Thanks. Now i can answer all my friends and spouse immediately instead of ghosting them for days.

esafak 1 year ago |

Is it possible to augment WhatsApp's SQLite installation with an extension?

hansmayer 1 year ago |

> 99% of your life is stored in WhatsApp

That's quite a presumption to make.

1oooqooq 1 year ago | |

that's a low estimate if you live in India or south America.

echoangle 1 year ago |

As others have already said, think about what you're doing when you use this.

If you connect a not-selhosted LLM to this, you're effectively uploading chat message with other people to a third-party server. The people you chat with have an expectation of privacy so this would probably be illegal in many jurisdictions.

ahstilde 1 year ago |

could i use this to create groupchat summaries?

lharries 1 year ago | |

Yep!

deutschepost 1 year ago |

It is crazy how out of touch people on this platform can be. I live in Europe but have been to Asia and South America. People use WhatsApp everywhere. Just because you live in North America where everyone uses SMS/iMessage/whatever doesn't mean everyone does. I can remember my parents scolding me because they got charged for me receiving some SMS. WhatsApp was a gamechanger. You could send messages or pictures without having to think about the price of it (While being connected to a WLAN...). So at some point no one used SMS anymore. iMessage was out of the question also, because only a very small amount of people had iPhones. And everyone was scared of sending a Message because you wouldn't know if the Message would cost you or not. But everyone had WhatsApp.

For some people it is a requirement to have a social life. It is not your choice to use it or not. Network effects are taking care of that. If you think Signal or whatever is a better choice, good on you. But if you don't want to cut ties with some of your friends, prepare to use multiple apps. Including WhatsApp.

jascha_eng 1 year ago | |

I live in europe and my social life is spread out between telegram, whatsapp, signal, discord. For professional life you could even include linkedin and slack. A single MCP server wont ever cut it for me and adding 6 for 6 different tools will confuse any llm and make it send the message to the wrong person. Completely ignoring the fact that I would not use this anyways... like people want to talk to ME not an LLM. Whatsapp has a chat with Llama now anyways if that's who they want to talk to.

hemlock4593 1 year ago | |

> WhatsApp was a gamechanger. You could send messages or pictures without having to think about the price of it (While being connected to a WLAN...)

Back, when data plans were around 1GB or less some network providers didn't charge you for using whatsapp on specific plans in Europe. There were also whatsapp branded sim cards, but I haven't seem them for a long time though.

_def 1 year ago |

If I find out someone pipes my chat messages into a LLM, I will not converse with that person anymore.

master-lincoln 1 year ago |

If 99% of your life is stored at one of the biggest advertising companies in the world you already gave up on privacy anyway...

charlie-83 1 year ago | |

All messages are e2e encrypted though right?

ideashower 1 year ago | | |

Messages are. I do not believe that metadata about the messages are, however. So they know who you're speaking to, at what frequency, and from where.

JonnyaiR 1 year ago | | |

my mom showed me her phone the other day - she had updated her Whatsapp App and now the search bar has changed from "search your chats" to "search chats or ask Meta AI anything". I've googled a bit but did not find an option to disable meta AI and also found no definitive answer what Meta AI actually does - if i search for a chat, does it use this chat as context to provide answers? does it run locally (i highly doubt that)? is it only another interface to chat with an llm? It sure seems that this might be a stepping stone to pipe Whatsapp Messages into Meta AI and thus ignoring e2ee, not sure if it's done already but the line is getting quite thin.

sschueller 1 year ago | |

What guarantee do I have that what moves between soft keyboard and the message window is not intercepted and same goes for displayed messages?

It's a closed source client. End to end encryption means nothing.

aargh_aargh 1 year ago | |

So this is a special case where two wrongs DO make a right when directed at a single victim?