Channels Overview

Channels are the communication bridges between Sophon and the outside world. Each channel adapter normalizes platform-specific messages into Sophon's universal SophonMessage format, so your agent behaves consistently regardless of where a conversation originates.

Supported Channels

Channel	Connection Method	Media Support
WebChat	Built-in (always available)	Text, images, files
Telegram	Bot API token	Text, images, audio, video, files, stickers
Discord	Bot token	Text, images, files
Slack	Socket Mode (App + Bot tokens)	Text, images, files
WhatsApp	Business Cloud API	Text, images, audio, video, files, stickers
Email	IMAP/SMTP	Text, HTML, file attachments
Microsoft Teams	Bot Framework	Text, images, files
Signal	signal-cli REST bridge	Text, images, files
Matrix	Matrix SDK	Text, images, files
SMS	Twilio	Text only
Mattermost	Bot account (server URL + token)	Text (image captions)
IRC	Raw IRC over TCP	Text only
Google Chat	Chat API (service account)	Text (image captions)
LINE	Messaging API	Text (image captions)
Feishu / Lark	Custom app (App ID + Secret)	Text (image captions)
iMessage	BlueBubbles server	Text only
Nostr	Relays (key pair)	Text only

How Channels Work

Add a channel via the Dashboard or CLI
Configure credentials (API tokens, OAuth, etc.)
Test the connection to verify everything works
Activate the channel to start receiving messages

When a message arrives on any channel, the adapter converts it to a SophonMessage and routes it to the configured agent. The agent's response is converted back to the platform's native format and sent through the same channel.

Agent Routing

Each channel can be routed to a specific agent. When set to the default agent, Sophon's AgentRouter can automatically dispatch messages to the most appropriate agent based on content.

Configure routing per channel in the Dashboard under Channels > [channel name] > Routing, or in channels.json:

{
  "routing": {
    "agentId": "default",
    "dmBehavior": "main-session",
    "groupBehavior": "mention-only"
  }
}

Routing also controls group behavior: each channel has a group policy (mention-only by default on Pro/Enterprise — Personal-tier instances respond to all group messages — plus all-messages, disabled, and an allowlist mode with a per-channel list of allowed groups). See Group Chats: Mentions, Debounce & Reply Context for policies and mention triggers.

On platforms with threads (Slack threads, Discord forum posts, Telegram forum topics, and more), each thread gets its own isolated session — separate history and context from the main channel. See Threads & Sessions.

Message Handling

A few behaviors apply to inbound messages:

Rapid bursts are debounced — on every channel, several messages sent in quick succession coalesce into a single agent turn, so the agent replies once with full context. See Group Chats.
Replies and quotes carry context — on supported channels, when someone replies to or quotes an earlier message, the quoted author and text are passed to the agent. See the support matrix in Group Chats.
Inbound media is pre-digested to text — on every channel, images, audio, and video are converted into text the agent can reason over. See Media Understanding.

Attachment Limits

Sophon enforces per-channel attachment limits to prevent abuse:

Limit	Value
Max file size	25 MB
Max files per message	10
Supported types	Images (PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF), Audio (MP3, WAV, OGG), Video (MP4, WEBM), Documents (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV, TXT)

Files received through any channel are automatically processed by the Document Pipeline when applicable.