Wafer

An example Phoenix project showcasing how to use WhatsApp as a frontend for your Phoenix backend using the WhatsApp Business Platform.

What we are building

Let's create a WhatsApp app for a co-working space that allows users to:

• Book a desk
• Book a meeting room
• View their bookings
• Cancel a booking

Implementation details

• There's a controller that receives WhatsApp messages from Meta's webhook.
• We start a GenServer for each WhatsApp contact who is messaging us, storing chat messages in the state.
• We are not interested in storing messages, as chat sessions are short-lived and ephemeral (e.g., booking a desk).
• We have a GPT-based AI agent that answers users' basic questions.
• We also have a list of predefined flows (e.g., a flow for booking a desk).
• When the AI agent recognizes predefined intents (e.g., “book a desk”), it triggers the corresponding flow.

Architecture

Contact Process

Phoenix instructions

To start your Phoenix server:

• Run mix setup to install and setup dependencies
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server or inside IEx with iex -S mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Ready to run in production? Please check our deployment guides.

To start Observer you can run:

iex -S mix phx.server
Mix.ensure_application!(:observer)
:observer.start()