The community chat bot that brings people together, hosted anywhere.

Live transit and weather answers, welcomes for newcomers, group memory, event reminders, hosted anywhere.

docker compose up -d · WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams (planned)

Davis Sq Crew Ana, Marcus, Garbanzo Bean, +23

Ana anyone know if the red line is ok? heading to Porter in 20 6:41 PM

Marcus @garbanzo is the red line running normally? 6:41 PM

Garbanzo Bean 🚇 Red Line is running with minor delays after an earlier signal problem at Harvard. Next trains at Davis: 4 min (Alewife) / 7 min (Braintree). You'll make Porter fine. 🫘 6:42 PM

Ana lifesaver 🙌 6:42 PM

Deployment

Hosting Options

Docker
Kubernetes
Amazon Web Services
Linux, WSL

# 1. configure
git clone https://github.com/jjhickman/garbanzo-bot.git
cd garbanzo-bot && npm run setup
# 2. run
docker compose up -d

Features

Live lookups

Transit, weather, news, venues, books. Requested in any natural language!

Group memory

Add community facts yourself or collect them automatically. Everything is viewable and removable.

Events

Weather and transit attached to meetup plans. A reminder before start time. Sunday recap for owners.

Moderation

Flags go to the owner for review. Edited messages get re-checked. Strikes tracked per member. No automatic punishment.

AI providers

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, OpenRouter. Any order, automatic failover. Cost readout included. Ollama for local replies.

Monitoring

Prometheus and Grafana powered dashboards for observing community activity, token spend, and more.

Gallery

Garbanzo writing a personal welcome to a new member's introduction — New member greetings

Garbanzo reporting live MBTA transit alerts — Local Transit Updates

Garbanzo giving a local weather report — Local Weather updates

Garbanzo generating a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet PDF — D&D (5e) character sheet generation, requested in natural language

Where it runs

WhatsApp production
Slack official API runtime
Discord official API runtime
Teams planned

Support

Maintained in spare time. Contributions cover API costs.

Bean Sprout

Roadmap updates and supporter shout-outs.

For individual supporters

Steady Simmer

Priority issue triage and monthly maintainer notes.

For active community operators

Kitchen Crew

Onboarding review and release planning input.

For production teams

Support on Patreon GitHub Sponsors