Bots: An introduction for developers

Bots are third-party applications that run inside Telegram. Users can interact with bots by sending them messages, commands and inline requests. You control your bots using HTTPS requests to our bot API.

1. What can I do with bots?

To name just a few things, you could use bots to:

Get customized notifications and news. A bot can act as a smart newspaper, sending you relevant content as soon as it's published.
Forbes Bot, TechCrunch Bot
Integrate with other services. A bot can enrich Telegram chats with content from external services.
Image Bot, GIF bot, IMDB bot, Wiki bot
Create custom tools. A bot may provide you with alerts, weather forecasts, translations, formatting or other services.
Poll bot, GitHub Bot, Markdown bot
Build single- and multiplayer games. A bot can play chess and checkers against you, act as host in quiz games, or even take up the dungeon master's dice for an RPG.
Trivia bot
Build social services. A bot could connect people looking for conversation partners based on common interests or proximity.
HotOrBot
Do virtually anything else. Except for dishes — bots are terrible at doing the dishes.

2. How do bots work?

At the core, Telegram Bots are special accounts that do not require an additional phone number to set up. Users can interact with bots in two ways:

Send messages and commands to bots by opening a chat with them or by adding them to groups. This is useful for chat bots or news bots like the official TechCrunch and Forbes bots.
Send requests directly from the input field by typing the bot's @username and a query. This allows sending content from inline bots directly into any chat, group or channel.

Messages, commands and requests sent by users are passed to the software running on your servers. Our intermediary server handles all encryption and communication with the Telegram API for you. You communicate with this server via a simple HTTPS-interface that offers a simplified version of the Telegram API. We call that interface our Bot API.

A detailed description of the Bot API is available on this page »

3. How do I create a bot?

There's a… bot for that. Just talk to BotFather (described below) and follow a few simple steps. Once you've created a bot and received your authorization token, head down to the Bot API manual to see what you can teach your bot to do.

You may also like to check out some code examples here »

4. How are bots different from humans?

Bots have no online status and no last seen timestamps, the interface shows the label ‘bot’ instead.
Bots have limited cloud storage — older messages may be removed by the server shortly after they have been processed.
Bots can't initiate conversations with users. A user must either add them to a group or send them a message first. People can use telegram.me/<bot_username> links or username search to find your bot.
Bot usernames always end in ‘bot’ (e.g. @TriviaBot, @GitHub_bot).
When added to a group, bots do not receive all messages by default (see Privacy mode).
Bots never eat, sleep or complain (unless expressly programmed otherwise).

Bot perks

Telegram bots are unique in many ways — we offer customized keyboards, additional interfaces for default commands and deep linking as well as markdown support and a special privacy mode for groups.

Inline mode

Users can interact with your bot via inline queries straight from the text input field in any chat. All they need to do is start a message with your bot's username and then type a query.

Having received the query, your bot can return some results. As soon as the user taps one of them, it will be sent to the user's currently opened chat. This way, people can request content from your bot in any of their chats, groups or channels.

Check out this blog to see a sample inline bot in action.

Read more about the inline mode »

Keyboards

Traditional chat bots can of course be taught to understand human language. But sometimes you want some more formal input from the user — and this is where custom keyboards can become extremely useful.

Whenever your bot sends a message, it can pass along a special keyboard with predefined reply options (see ReplyKeyboardMarkup). Telegram apps that receive the message will display your keyboard to the user. Tapping any of the buttons will immediately send the respective command. This way you can drastically simplify user interaction with your bot.

We currently support text and emoji for your buttons. Here are some custom keyboard examples:

For more technical information on custom keyboards, please consult the Bot API manual (see sendMessage).

Commands

Commands present a more flexible way to communicate with your bot. The following syntax may be used:

/command [optional] [argument]

A command must always start with the ‘/’ symbol and may not be longer than 32 characters. Commands can use latin letters, numbers and underscores. Here are a few examples:

/get_messages_stats
/set_timer 10min Alarm!
/get_timezone London, UK

Messages that start with a slash will be always passed to the bot (along with replies to its messages and messages that @mention the bot by username). Telegram apps will:

Suggest a list of supported commands with descriptions when the user enters a ‘/’ (for this to work, you need to have provided a list of commands to the BotFather). Tapping on a command in the list immediately sends the command.
Show an additional (/) button in the input field in all chats with bots. Tapping it types a ‘/’ and shows the list of commands.
Highlight /commands in messages. When the user taps a highlighted command, the command is sent at once.

If multiple bots are in a group, it is possible to add bot usernames to commands in order to avoid confusion:

/start@TriviaBot
/start@ApocalypseBot

This is done automatically when commands are selected via the list of suggestions. Please remember that your bot needs to be able to process commands that are followed by its username.

Global commands

In order to make it easier for users to navigate the bot multiverse, we ask all developers to support a few basic commands. Telegram apps will have interface shortcuts for these commands.

/start - begins interaction with the user, e.g., by sending a greeting message. This command can also be used to pass additional parameters to the bot (see Deep linking)
/help - returns a help message. It can be a short text about what your bot can do and a list of commands.
/settings - (if applicable) returns the bot's settings for this user and suggests commands to edit these settings.

Users will see a Start button when they first open a conversation with your bot. Help and Settings links will be available in the menu on the bot's profile page.

Formatting: bold, italic, fixed-width text and inline links

You can use bold, italic or fixed-width text, as well as inline links in your bots' messages. Telegram clients will render them accordingly.

Privacy mode

Bots are frequently added to groups in order to augment communication between human users, e.g. by providing news, notifications from external services or additional search functionality. This is especially true for work-related groups. Now, when you share a group with a bot, you tend to ask yourself “How can I be sure that the little rascal isn't selling my chat history to my competitors?” The answer is — privacy mode.

A bot running in privacy mode will not receive all messages that people send to the group. Instead, it will only receive:

All messages that start with a slash ‘/’ (see Commands above)
Messages that @mention the bot by username
Replies to the bot's own messages
Service messages (people added or removed from the group, etc.)

On one hand, this helps some of us sleep better at night (in our tinfoil nightcaps), on the other — it allows the bot developer to save a lot of resources, since they won't need to process tens of thousands irrelevant messages each day.

Privacy mode is enabled by default for all bots. It can be disabled, so that the bot will begin receiving all messages like an ordinary user. We only recommend doing this in cases where it is absolutely necessary for your bot to work — users can always see a bot's current privacy setting in the group members list. In most cases, using the force reply option for the bot's messages should be more than enough.

Deep linking

Telegram bots have a deep linking mechanism, that allows for passing additional parameters to the bot on startup. It could be a command that launches the bot — or an auth token to connect the user's Telegram account to their account on some external service.

Each bot has a link that opens a conversation with it in Telegram — https://telegram.me/<bot username>. You can add the parameters start or startgroup to this link, with values up to 64 characters long. For example:

https://telegram.me/triviabot?startgroup=test

A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _ and - are allowed. We recommend using base64url to encode parameters with binary and other types of content.

Following a link with the start parameter will open a one-on-one conversation with the bot, showing a START button in the place of the input field. If the startgroup parameter is used, the user will be prompted to select a group to add the bot to. As soon as a user confirms the action (presses the START button in their app or selects a group to add the bot to), your bot will receive a message from that user in this format:

/start PAYLOAD

PAYLOAD stands for the value of the start or startgroup parameter that was passed in the link.

Deep linking Example

Suppose the website example.com would like to send notifications to its users via a Telegram bot. Here's what they could do to enable notifications for a user with the ID 123.

Create a bot with a suitable username, e.g. @ExampleComBot
Set up a webhook for incoming messages
Generate a random string of a sufficient length, e.g. $memcache_key = "vCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PA"
Put the value 123 with the key $memcache_key into Memcache for 3600 seconds (one hour)
Show our user the button https://telegram.me/ExampleComBot?start=vCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PA
Configure the webhook processor to query Memcached with the parameter that is passed in incoming messages beginning with /start. If the key exists, record the chat_id passed to the webhook as telegram_chat_id for the user 123. Remove the key from Memcache.
Now when we want to send a notification to the user 123, check if they have the field telegram_chat_id. If yes, use the sendMessage method in the Bot API to send them a message in Telegram.

BotFather

Jump to top to learn everything about Telegram bots »

BotFather is the one bot to rule them all. It will help you create new bots and change settings for existing ones.

Create a new bot

Use the /newbot command to create a new bot. The BotFather will ask you for a name and username, then generate an authorization token for your new bot.

The name of your bot will be displayed in contact details and elsewhere.

The Username is a short name, to be used in mentions and telegram.me links. Usernames are 5-32 characters long and are case insensitive, but may only include Latin characters, numbers, and underscores. Your bot's username must end in ‘bot’, e.g. ‘tetris_bot’ or ‘TetrisBot’.

The token is a string along the lines of 110201543:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw that will be required to authorize the bot and send requests to the Bot API.

Generate an authorization token for your bot

If your existing token is compromised or you lost it for some reason, use the /token command to generate a new one.

Edit settings

The remaining commands are pretty self-explanatory:

/setname – change your bot's name.
/setdescription — changes the bot's description, a short text of up to 512 characters, describing your bot. Users will see this text at the beginning of the conversation with the bot, titled ‘What can this bot do?’.
/setabouttext — changes the bot's about info, an even shorter text of up to 120 characters. Users will see this text on the bot's profile page. When they share your bot with someone, this text will be sent together with the link.
/setuserpic — changes the bot‘s profile pictures. It’s always nice to put a face to a name.
/setcommands — changes the list of commands supported by your bot. Each command has a name (must start with a slash ‘/’, alphanumeric plus underscores, no more than 32 characters, case-insensitive), parameters, and a text description. Users will see the list of commands whenever they type ‘/’ in a conversation with your bot.
/setjoingroups — determines whether your bot can be added to groups or not. Any bot must be able to process private messages, but if your bot was not designed to work in groups, you can disable this.
/setprivacy — determines which messages your bot will receive when added to a group. With privacy mode disabled, the bot will receive all messages. We recommend leaving privacy mode enabled.
/deletebot — deletes your bot and frees its username.

Please note, that it may take a few minutes for changes to take effect.

And that's about it.
If you've got any questions, please check out our Bot FAQ »

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