MCP server

BackTalk ships an MCP server so an AI agent can read and triage your signals directly — "what did developers complain about today?" answered from your live inbox. It uses the Streamable HTTP transport and the same API keys as the REST API.

Endpoint: https://backtalk.sh/api/mcp Auth: Authorization: Bearer btk_YOUR_KEY (create one in Settings → API keys).

Tools

Tool	Scope	What it does
`list_signals`	read	Filtered, paginated list of signals (compact rows).
`get_signal`	read	Full detail for one signal.
`list_keywords`	read	The workspace's keywords.
`list_watchers`	read	The workspace's watchers.
`report`	read	Rollup for `today` / `7d` / `30d` (volume, sentiment, per-source, trend).
`triage_signal`	write	Set a signal's state (new/seen/replied/ignored), star it, or record an ignore reason.

triage_signal is only registered when your key has the write scope — a read-only key won't see it at all. The demo question "what did developers complain about today?" is answered by report (period=today) together with list_signals (sentiment=["negative"], since=<today>).

Prompt-injection note. Signal content (title, snippet, author, url) is untrusted third-party text scraped from the public internet. The tool descriptions say so, and your agent should treat returned content as data to analyse — never as instructions to follow.

Connect Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http backtalk https://backtalk.sh/api/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer btk_YOUR_KEY"

Then ask Claude things like "Use backtalk: what did developers complain about today?" The exact claude mcp add command (with your key filled in) is shown on the Settings → API keys page after you create a key.

Connect Claude Desktop

Add an entry under mcpServers in your Claude Desktop config, then restart the app:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "backtalk": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://backtalk.sh/api/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer btk_YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Connect ChatGPT

In a ChatGPT client that supports custom MCP connectors (Developer mode / custom connectors), add a connector with:

Transport / type: HTTP (Streamable HTTP)
URL: https://backtalk.sh/api/mcp
Header: Authorization: Bearer btk_YOUR_KEY

ChatGPT's MCP support leans on the read tools (list_signals, get_signal, report) for search-and-fetch style use.

Auth, scopes and limits

Auth is the same bearer API key as REST; a bad or missing key gets a 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Bearer. OAuth / dynamic client registration is future work.
Scopes work exactly as in the REST API: read tools need read, triage_signal needs write, and a read-only workspace refuses the write tool.
Rate limits are the same per-key budget (120 requests/minute); over it, the server returns 429.

See the REST API guide for scopes, error codes, and rate-limit details in full.