The bot that lied to cricket fans with a straight face: Temporal x San Francisco Unicorns

A Temporal developer advocate built a WhatsApp and Telegram chatbot for San Francisco Unicorns cricket fans, designed to answer questions, provide grounded live scores and news, send match reminders, support predictions, and direct users to tickets and merchandise. The bot uses Gemini for conversational responses while relying on live data tools for factual information, with four Temporal Workflows managing conversations, durable reminders, minute-by-minute score subscriptions, and post-match summaries so tasks can continue through Worker failures. Building for WhatsApp required handling its 24-hour messaging restrictions, approved templates, signed and duplicate webhooks, button limits, and fixed webhook endpoints, while WhatsApp ultimately accounted for about 97% of sign-ups. During an early match, a faulty budget guard based on an outdated API free-tier limit stopped score refreshes and caused the bot to report stale results confidently, revealing that durable infrastructure cannot prevent application-logic errors but can provide replayable execution records for diagnosis. After testing and launch support from the team, fan activity grew around match days, with users returning for player questions, reminders, live updates, and prediction competitions, illustrating how durable workflow systems can support long-running, failure-tolerant interactions beyond sports bots.

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