Five new capabilities landed in the Linq Partner API today. Docs are already updated.
Inbound contact card shares
When someone shares a contact card with your number, you now get it delivered straight to your webhooks — no polling, no separate fetch. Outbound contact card sending was already there; this closes the loop, so an agent can receive an intro, parse it, and act on it in the same turn.
@mentions, inbound and outbound
Your agent can now mention specific participants in a group chat, and you receive an event when someone mentions your agent. This is the primitive that makes a bot in a busy group chat viable: it can stay quiet until it is addressed by name, instead of parsing every message to guess whether it was being spoken to.
Group chat typing indicators
Set typing status in group chats, the same way you already could in one-to-one threads. Worth using deliberately — a typing indicator during a slow tool call is the difference between an agent that feels responsive and one that feels broken.
Custom backgrounds
Set the chat background — color, animated, or photo. Your product's threads no longer have to look like every other thread on the device.
Polls
Send a poll, receive the votes. Useful for a structured answer where free text would be ambiguous: scheduling, a confirm step before an agent takes an irreversible action, or a quick preference capture without a form.
What you can build now
A scheduling agent that lives in a group chat.
A user adds your agent to a group thread with three colleagues. Someone shares a contact card for a fourth person who must attend — your webhook receives the card, and the agent adds that person to the invite list. The agent then stays silent. It does not answer every message in the thread, because it only acts on the mention event. When a participant writes "@agent find us a time", the agent sets a typing indicator, checks the four calendars, and sends a poll with three time slots. The votes come back as events. The agent books the winner.
None of the five features carries that flow alone. Together they do.
All five are live now. Full reference, payload shapes, and examples at docs.linqapp.com.
