ClawdBot (OpenClaw): The self-hosted AI that Siri should have been (Full setup)

Remember when Siri came out, we all thought, this is it. An AI that understands you, remembers your preferences, actually helps.

Yeah, that didn't happen. Siri, My favorite fruit is a watermelon.

Sorry, I don't understand.

Siri still can't remember what I told it yesterday, or even 10 seconds ago. And Google Assistant suggests restaurants I've never even asked for, but that future that we were promised, it exists now. It's just not coming from Apple or Google. This is ClawdBot, created by Peter Steinberger, with an, incredibly active community growing around it every day. It's a personal AI assistant that runs on your local machine or a $5 per month server. It's an assistant that actually remembers things, works inside the messaging apps you already use, and it can message you first, proactively, and it can do anything you can do on your computer, but faster and better and while you sleep. I'll show you exactly how to set this up on, a $5 per month server in about 15 minutes. Ready? Let's go. So what exactly is ClawdBot? In simple terms, it's a self hosted AI assistant, but that is a huge understatement. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, where you go to a website and type, ClawdBot lives inside the messaging apps that you already use. WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, could be even imessage. If you have a Mac running somewhere, you talk to it the same way you would text a friend. Four things that make this different from anything else out there. First, it's always available wherever you are, on your phone, on the go, at your computer. Same assistant, same conversation on all of your devices. Second, persistent memory. It doesn't forget what I told it yesterday. If I mention it I have a meeting on, Friday, it remembers that if I asked it to track something for me, it keeps track. It's not starting from scratch every single time. Third, it can be proactive. It can reach out to you with morning briefings, reminders, alerts when something you care about happens. And this isn't the chatbot waiting for you to type something, it's an assistant that actually assists. And fourth, and this is the game changer. Anything you can do on your computer, it can do too. Browse the web, fill out forms, check your email. Research topics, control applications, do development work, programming for you. Launch agents, I use it every day. It sends me daily research summaries on, topics I'm following. It flags important emails. It reminds me about my tasks. And all of this happens in Telegram. I don't even need to open another app or remember to check something. But there is one catch for ClawdBot to message you proactively, to always be available. To keep that persistent memory, it needs to be running 24. 7. And running it on, your laptop means that every time you close the lid, your assistant goes to sleep. Not great. So the solution is a vps, a virtual private server. It's basically a tiny computer in the cloud that runs all the time. And the good news is it's cheap Hetzner, which is what I'm going to use today, has small servers for roughly $5 a month. So the total cost of your AI assistant is the computer that will be running the assistant, which is the VPS, $5 per month plus the brains that will be running that assistant. In my case, it's Claude Code, which is either 20 or 100 or $200 depending on how heavy user you are. But you can use other LLMs as well. Or you can use API keys where cost is usage based and you don't need to pay monthly. Subscription. Subscription. Let's go with Germany. $4 per Create new project ClawdBot. And inside the new project, I need to create a resource and add a server. I'll choose cost optimized. 4 gigs of RAM, Germany. €3. Less than $5. Ubuntu is the right one. Create and buy now takes about 30 seconds to 2 minutes for the server to come up. The server is live now, but before we go to the installation stage, let me quickly explain how all the pieces fit together. It will make the setup make more sense. ClawdBot has four main pieces. I'm the user on the left interacting in my messaging apps. And when I interact with ClawdBot, I the first thing that I touch is the gateway. it is your front door and it connects to all of your messaging platforms, Telegram, WhatsApp, whatever you are using. And when you send the message, the gateway receives it and it also handles that scheduling those proactive morning briefings that run through Cron jobs in the gateway. Then there is the agent. The agent is the brain. This is where your AI model lives. ClawdBot supports different providers, Cloud Philanthropic, OpenAI's GPT, even local models. If you want to go that route. I use Claude Code and that's what we'll be setting up today. Skills is where the magic happens. Skills extend what your agent can do out of the box. It can chat, but with skills it can search the web, check your email, interact with calendars, control a browser. And then finally, memory. This is what gives ClawdBot persistent context. It remembers your conversations, your preferences, things that you asked it to track. And this is why you don't start from scratch every time. simple concept in architecture. So let's build it now. The server is live.

What's important is the public IP for the server. Let's copy it

and let's actually ssh into it. And the password should have arrived in the email as soon as the server went live. Okay, I'm in. This is now a fresh Ubuntu server ready to go. And let me do a quick update first. It's always a good idea on a fresh server.

okay, updated, everything, including the kernel, so it's recommended to reboot. Let's do it.

Now. Everything is updated Now, quick optional step, but one that I highly recommend to install tailscale. It puts the server on your private network so that you can manage your ClawdBot without exposing extra ports to the public Internet. And this is how you do it.

Sudo tailscale up. we need to authenticate.

tailscale up. we need to authenticate.

I already have an account with tailscale. And what you need to do is connect the device. Okay, logged in successfully. This is the new machine added here.

And this is the IP that we will be using, which we can get by

tailscale ip. We'll use this later for secure access. One more important step before we install ClawdBot. We should create a dedicated user instead of running everything as root. Some tools or commands don't work properly as root and it's better security practice anyway. So let's add a user named ClawdBot.

tailscale ip. We'll use this later for secure access. One more important step before we install ClawdBot. We should create a dedicated user instead of running everything as root. Some tools or commands don't work properly as root and it's better security practice anyway. So let's add a user named ClawdBot.

New user added. add, it to sudo okay, we have a new user. Now let's switch to that user. From now on, we will do everything as this user. So let's start installing ClawdBot now. Because this is a new server, it has almost nothing and we need a few things as prerequisites. Node JS is one of them. So let's install it. and run these commands. We have node js And we have pnpm working as well. Also let's install homebrew. We'll need it later for adding skills, so we might as well do it now.

Homebrew installed now we need to run these commands.

Homebrew is running now

one more thing before we actually get to the wizard and to ClawdBot. Let's install Claude Code now. It will be needed later on but I also like to to have it running during the setup during the wizard so that I can ask questions as I go. Claude Code docs installation on Linux it.

Add cloud to path and launch claude code with dangerously skip permissions. Now there are two options how to login I either your subscription or API. I have a subscription so I want to use my subscription. And usually on your local machine. This would open a browser for you because this is on a remote vps there is no browser right now. So it gives you a link that you can click and it will open it here and give you the code, the authorization that you can then paste,

copy code, paste here and we should be authorized. Okay, we are in Now finally the main event will install ClawdBot from source, not the quick version. This gives us the latest features and makes it easier to update and also it's better for development if you want to look at customers code. If you want to contribute, I'll go with the hackable version. So let's open a second tab. The first one is running our Claude Code. If we have any questions we'll ask it here. ssh clawdbot and that tailscale IP that we got and I used Tailscape to login to that server. So let's start with cloning the repository. I'll go with pnpm cd ClawdBot pnpm install Pnpm run build. And PNPM run UI install for web UI interface. Done. And now for the fun part, the onboarding wizard. This is going to walk us through setting everything up.

The wizard is much better now than it was at the beginning and it's being constantly improved. So now there's a quick start. But I want to go with the advanced version to also show what options are available. And I'll walk you through the options that I'm choosing. But the reason why we have Claude Code running here in that directory with the repository. So it knows everything about ClawdBot, how it's built, how it's configured. So we can ask any questions we want in here. So to show you the workflow that I have, either when setting up something with ClawdBot or when there is an error that sometimes happens, or Let's say I don't know which option to choose. I'm running my ClawdBot on a VPS remote machine and I'm running the onboarding wizard. Which option should I choose Here.

And then paste the option, Choose local gateway and you can do it with every step workspace directory, the one that we have Again we need to authenticate. We already did that for Claude Code. So going through the same getting a token, pasting it here,

gateway port. Let's use the default you need to choose loopback and off. For tailscale, we'll go with serve. Do not reset tailscale funnel on exit Configure chat providers now. So this is how we are going to access

gateway port. Let's use the default you need to choose loopback and off. For tailscale, we'll go with serve. Do not reset tailscale funnel on exit Configure chat providers now. So this is how we are going to access

ClawdBot and how we are going to talk to it. So let's configure that. You can configure telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack Signal and imessage. But imessage is only available when you are running this on a Mac. This is a Linux vps so we don't have imessage available But let's set up a telegram bot quickly now space to select it and now it gives the instructions what to do. So open Telegram and chat with Botfather user. find Botfather.

And ask it to create a new bot. All right, how we are going to call it Mine will be sharkybot. A username must be unique so you probably will try a few times. And and what's important that it must end in bot. Velvet Sharky

sharkybot. A username must be unique so you probably will try a few times. And and what's important that it must end in bot. Velvet Sharky

Bot. And the only thing that we need from here is this token that we are going to paste here. DM access policies yes Pairing configure skills for now BERT so I use BERT to

read Twitter, search Twitter and posts ClawdHub to search for skills install skills update skills Gemini if you want to use Gemini instead of cloud for example this is super important for me, to access Gmail and my calendars. Google Places API to search for places around me Nanobanana Pro it allows my assistant to create images for me. Obsidian is where I keep all my notes. So I'm giving access to my AI assistant to all my knowledge base. OpenAI whisper is for the assistants to understand voice notes that I can send it Through Telegram or WhatsApp. So if I'm on the go I can just record a quick message, send it out and it will understand it and respond to me and do whatever I'm telling it to do. And this is another one that is super helpful. It can summarize anything for you if I just send the URL and ask the assistant to summarize it for me it will come back with a quick summary. It can summarize also PDFs, audios or even whole YouTube videos. So these are the skills that I would recommend to start with. Install gateway daemon. Yes, definitely. That's how we will interact

and use. Note. system enabled and running Telegram configured. looks like ClawdBot should be live, but let's check it. Let's go to Telegram, to that user that we created, Sharkybot and let's try to chat and it gives a helpful message. It is not linked yet and you need to link it with this command

and use. Note. system enabled and running Telegram configured. looks like ClawdBot should be live, but let's check it. Let's go to Telegram, to that user that we created, Sharkybot and let's try to chat and it gives a helpful message. It is not linked yet and you need to link it with this command

ClawdBot pairing approve.

And with this pairing code and with that command I now approved the telegram sender with this id which is me. And only I can give commands to my bot so nobody else, even if they message that bot directly, can give it commands and make it do things. I've got a working AI assistant on a five dollar server that I own and importantly only I can talk to. Let's see if it's live. Hey, you there.

Boom. It's alive and it started talking to me. Awesome. so here's what it's doing. It has just been born and it wants to know what it is, who I am, how we are going talk to each other, what's the preferred style. And I recommend spending some time

with the setup. The more time you spend, the more information you provide, the more useful it will be later on. For now let's start with something short and simple and you can expand later. so this is something short and simple. You can definitely can and should give more information but at the bare minimum you tell what it is, what the assistant is. You tell who you are and you tell the name, the vibe and give the emoji so that it can communicate with you better. Okay. LLM request rejected. This seems like an anthropic

restriction for now. But we can switch the LLM model switch the brain to something else. Okay, what happened here is as I was recording the video in that very moment, Anthropic changed something in their API and now it's temporarily broken. So that's not an issue because ClawdBot can switch the brains on the go. So. So like mentioned at the beginning the brain can be replaced. So I replaced Claude Code with Gemini. For now Gemini. But if that was my normal ClawdBot normal assistant and if we had the memory, it would still persist. The memory stays on my machine and we are just making a surgery replacing the brain, the part that does the thinking, but the part that remembers still is intact and nothing happened to it. We control it, it's on our machine. So it replied to my questions that I sent earlier and it's now alive just with a new brain. It probably doesn't know it that it has a new brain right now. Now, how to quickly add skills with a web ui. Remember we installed the web UI during the installation and

it gave us this address to control that if we were installing this on our local machine, this would launch the web UI directly and we would be able to see the whole control center for ClawdBot. But it's on a vps, so we actually need to connect to that. And this is how you do that. We are actually forwarding the ports with SSH. Once we run that We have logged in and when we try to reload

we actually get the browser like the local host. But this is what is on the VPs. here we have the overview, what's already configured, the connections, we have the telegram, the instances and we can add skills. Okay, I gave it a ClawdHub skill skill and now it installed it and I should be able to use it. enable bird skill. Okay, Bird Skill is now enabled and now it gives me the instructions on how to give it a token so that it

knows that it's me and it can post and search as me. Let's go through some use cases and let's see what it can do when it works properly. So one thing that I particularly love is the proactive briefings that I set up to receive every day. And it gives me a summary of what's happening in the areas that I'm interested in, like AI or new models or anything that I want. And I just say to schedule a briefing for 8am, to give me

a summary of what happened in the last 24 hours or in the last week in this specific area, or give me the important stuff for today based on my email, based on my calendar that I gave access to. And then at 8am, instead of opening five different apps and getting distracted, I just have one message or a couple messages from ClawdBot and I know everything that I need to know and I can start my day. And this is just one example. You can set up, stock price alerts, weather warnings or news monitoring on specific topics Anything you can describe in a prompt, Some of the skills that I do recommend is web research, browser automation, email and calendar. That's essential for it to be really useful developer tools to

run coding agents for you to To give a couple specific examples of what people already did with ClawdBot, one of the community members created a WhatsApp, memory vault. They connected their entire startup's WhatsApp history. Over thousand voice messages, not just messages. had ClawdBot transcribe all of the messages, cross reference with their git commits, and then generate a searchable knowledge base linking all the discussions to whether they actually were implemented. And ClawdBot did this on the first try and no custom skills were needed. And another person automated their entire grocery shopping. They can now take a photo of, a recipe, and it automatically extracts ingredients, maps them to the grocery store, adds, them to the online cart, and just buys it for them. even if you don't find a skill in here for what you need, but you have a specific idea what you want to achieve, you can just build it, you can explain it to Claude Code, you can give access to the code base that we cloned, and you can tell what it has to do. It will build a skill for you. Boom. Okay, now an important note on security, because this is a real agent with real powers. First of all, go to documentation and Read the security page, and very important if you want to use WhatsApp instead of Telegram, use a dedicated phone number. Because WhatsApp doesn't have a bot concept like Telegram does. And if you link your own number, your personal WhatsApp, then every inbound message becomes the agent input. And here you have a lot of information of what to do and what not to do. So go through it and actually implement and take it seriously. Okay? But also let's be honest and let's not oversell it, ClawdBot is very early stage and Peter Steinberger, the maintainer himself admits that onboarding is still rough, which we saw today.

And you might hit some weird errors. I showed you how to deal with them. some skills work better than others. It's a work in progress. The documentation is improving, but there are still gaps there. But there's also a positive. The Discord community, what is happening here and this is happening live as everybody is talking, why Anthropic,

is having the error and I think someone, I think Peter already

fix that. They have a fix within minutes. So the Discord community is incredibly active. There are actually even two ClawdBot instances in there answering all the questions even if Peter is not there Also the updates are pushed not just daily, but probably hourly. You And development is so fast that once or twice I saw some error, I fixed it, I pushed a PR and by the time the PR was created, created, that was already fixed. So that's ClawdBot, a self hosted AI assistant that runs on a cheap vps, connects to your messaging apps, remembers your conversations and can actually reach out to help you if you want. To try yourself. Everything is linked in the description so you can go through docs, the, GitHub repo to ClawdHub for skills, the security guide important read that and the discord if you need help. If you found this useful, subscribe. I'm covering more AI tools that actually change workflows. And now go get yourself an assistant.

fix that. They have a fix within minutes. So the Discord community is incredibly active. There are actually even two ClawdBot instances in there answering all the questions even if Peter is not there Also the updates are pushed not just daily, but probably hourly. You And development is so fast that once or twice I saw some error, I fixed it, I pushed a PR and by the time the PR was created, created, that was already fixed. So that's ClawdBot, a self hosted AI assistant that runs on a cheap vps, connects to your messaging apps, remembers your conversations and can actually reach out to help you if you want. To try yourself. Everything is linked in the description so you can go through docs, the, GitHub repo to ClawdHub for skills, the security guide important read that and the discord if you need help. If you found this useful, subscribe. I'm covering more AI tools that actually change workflows. And now go get yourself an assistant.