Omni Octo

What Telegram requires before your AI agent can answer

On Telegram your business answers through a bot. What you need to make one, what its token is, how customers find it, and what Telegram does not let a bot do: write to someone first, or send a campaign.

Updated

On WhatsApp or SMS, your business has a phone number. On Telegram it has a bot: an account with its own name and its own @username, which customers find and message like any other contact. Your AI agent answers through it.

Brightwater Bike Repair’s bot is @BrightwaterBikesBot. A customer searches for it in Telegram, or taps the link on the shop’s website, presses Start, and sends three photos of a bent wheel. Everything they send reaches the shop through that bot.

What you need

  • A Telegram account — your own, on your phone or computer. The bot is made from it, and you need nothing else from Telegram: no business verification, no review, no fee.
  • A bot, made with @BotFather. BotFather is Telegram’s own bot for making bots. Search for @BotFather in Telegram, send /newbot, and answer its two questions: the bot’s display name (“Brightwater Bike Repair”) and its username, which must end in bot (“BrightwaterBikesBot”).
  • The bot’s token. When the bot is made, BotFather replies with a token: a long string of numbers, a colon, and letters. That token is what you paste into Omni Octo, and it is the only thing Omni Octo needs — connect your Telegram bot shows where.

Treat the token like a password. Anyone who has it controls the bot: they can read what customers send it and answer as you. If it leaks, send /revoke to BotFather for a new one, and paste the new token into Omni Octo.

One bot, one channel. Telegram sends each bot’s messages to one place only, so a bot can be connected to one Omni Octo channel at a time. For a second line — a separate bot for rentals, say — make a second bot.

How customers reach your bot

A customer has to find the bot and write to it first:

  • by searching for its @username in Telegram;
  • by tapping a link to it, https://t.me/BrightwaterBikesBot, on your website, in an email or on a printed QR code.

Either way they land in a chat with the bot and press Start. From then on, it is a conversation like any other, and it appears in /conversations.

What Telegram does not let a bot do

  • Write to someone first. A bot can only message people who have messaged it. So there is no way to start a Telegram conversation from Omni Octo: the Compose button in the inbox offers SMS, calls and email, and campaigns cannot be sent on Telegram.
  • Find a customer by phone number. A bot never sees a customer’s phone number unless the customer shares it. It knows their Telegram name, and that is what the inbox shows.

What Telegram does allow, unlike WhatsApp: there is no reply window. Once a customer has written to your bot, your agent or your team can answer them hours or days later.

Groups

This set of guides is about one-to-one chats between a customer and your bot. If you add the bot to a group, the agent answers in the group, and the whole group is one conversation in the inbox. Telegram also limits what a bot sees in a group by default. If you do not mean to run a group, keep the bot out of them: in BotFather, /setjoingroups turns joining groups off.

Where to go next