Through this it aims to simplify development of communications applications and promote code reuse within the free software and open source communities by defining a logical boundary between the applications and underlying network protocols.
There are free software implementations of various protocols that export Telepathy interfaces: Mission Control is the name of the component that provides a way for end-user applications to abstract some details of low level telepathy components such as connection managers.
[2] Tubes are Telepathy's mechanism for supporting arbitrary data transfer and remote IPC.
[3] Telepathy forms the basis of the instant messaging and voice/video calling software on the Nokia 770, N800, N810, N900, N9 and Jolla.
A channel might be used to send and receive text messages, or represent the contact list, or to establish a VoIP call.