Building a WhatsApp Travel Concierge with GPT-4o + Whisper + Flask

Hey everyone,
I wanted to share a project I’ve been developing called Chat with Bella — a real-time travel assistant that runs entirely on WhatsApp.

It uses:

  • GPT-4o for conversational responses (multi-language, context-aware)

  • Whisper for transcribing voice notes

  • Redis for chat history and daily message limits

  • Slack logging for monitoring performance

  • Flask API hosted on Ubuntu for webhook handling

The system manages real user interactions — answering travel questions, sending Google Maps links, and providing restaurant tips.

Here’s a simplified flow diagram:
User → WhatsApp → Meta Webhook → Flask → GPT-4o → Reply → WhatsApp

I’m currently exploring ways to improve:

  • Context compression for long conversations

  • Multi-channel expansion (Telegram, iMessage, etc.)

Would love to hear how others handle session context + rate limiting in production chatbots.