Building a News Monitoring Bot with OpenClaw

OpenClaw already runs as a persistent local agent connected to your messaging apps. With AgentPatch’s Google News tool connected, it can monitor topics and surface relevant articles on demand — or on a schedule if you configure one. No separate news aggregator required.

Why This Matters

Keeping up with fast-moving topics — a market you’re tracking, a competitor, a technology space — usually means checking multiple sources manually. An agent that can fetch and summarize news on command changes that workflow. You ask, it retrieves, you get a summary in your chat window.

OpenClaw’s always-on nature makes it a natural fit for this. It’s already running in the background connected to Telegram or Discord. Giving it Google News access through AgentPatch turns it into a lightweight monitoring bot.

Setup

The AgentPatch CLI is designed for AI agents to use via shell access. Install it, and your agent can discover and invoke any tool on the marketplace.

Install (zero dependencies, Python 3.10+):

pip install agentpatch

Set your API key:

export AGENTPATCH_API_KEY=your_api_key

Example commands your agent will use:

ap search "web search"
ap run google-search --input '{"query": "test"}'

Get your API key from the AgentPatch dashboard.

Install the AgentPatch skill from ClawHub — it teaches OpenClaw when to use AgentPatch and how to use the CLI:

clawhub install agentpatch

MCP Server (Alternative)

If you prefer raw MCP tool access instead of the skill, add AgentPatch to ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json:

{
  "mcp": {
    "servers": {
      "agentpatch": {
        "transport": "streamable-http",
        "url": "https://agentpatch.ai/mcp",
        "headers": {
          "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your actual key from the AgentPatch dashboard. Restart OpenClaw and it discovers all AgentPatch tools automatically.

Example

You’re tracking a few topics for a side project and you message your OpenClaw bot on Telegram:

“Monitor these topics for me and give me a morning briefing: ‘open source LLMs’, ‘AI coding tools’, ‘OpenAI news’. Start with today’s top stories on each.”

OpenClaw calls Google News for each topic, collects recent articles, and replies with a structured summary — top stories per topic, with source and date. In the same session you can follow up:

“Anything significant about Mistral specifically?”

OpenClaw runs a more targeted query and replies with the latest Mistral coverage. No configuration change, no new integration — it’s just using the same tool with a different search.

From there, you could ask OpenClaw to run this briefing every morning at 8am if your OpenClaw setup supports scheduled tasks — it’ll call Google News automatically and push results to your chat.

Wrapping Up

Connecting AgentPatch to OpenClaw gives you Google News access plus the full tool marketplace — web search, image generation, email, and more. Everything through the same connection. Get started at agentpatch.ai.

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