How To Create a Telegram Chatbot For Free

Step 1: Go to Telegram and talk to the BotFather

To create a Telegram chatbot, open the Telegram app on your phone or computer. Search for Botfather and click the Start button to start the conversation.

Step 2: Create a New Bot using “/newbot” command

In the conversation with the BotFather, click on the “/newbot” link or just type in “/newbot”:

Step 3: Give a Name to your Telegram Bot

Now, you need to give a name for your Telegram bot.

Just type in the name you want, for example “Chatimize Support Bot”:

Step 4: Choose a Username for your Telegram Bot

Lastly, BotFather will ask for the username for your bot.

This username can be used to create direct links to your chatbot and your chatbot flows.

So choose a username that’s easy to remember and related to your brand:

Important: Your username must end on “bot” and cannot contain any spaces!

Step 5: Generate and Save Your Telegram API Token

Now, our Telegram bot is created. You should copy the Telegram API Token you get from the BotFather (we’ll need this in the next step):

NOTE: Don’t share this API token with anyone else besides yourself!

Step 6: Create a Free ManyChat Account and Connect It to Your Telegram Bot

To create the content and logic of our Telegram chatbot, we will use Manychat.

Manychat is one of the best chatbots for Telegram. In fact, I’ve used this platform for almost all of my clients over the last 4 years, and it is:

• Easy to use, you can get started without any chatbot experience
• No-code platform, you can create bots without a single line of code
• Cheap, they offer a free plan and their paid plan already starts at $15/month

So the first thing that you need to do is create a free Manychat account (click on the button below to get a free discount code)

When you are on the Manychat website, click on Get started:

Click on Telegram:

And log in with your Telegram account:

Now, ManyChat will verify your Telegram account and your email. And once you have done that, your free ManyChat account is created.

The next step is to connect our Manychat account to the Telegram chatbot we just created.

To do that, go to Settings > Telegram and click on Connect:

And click on Create new bot:

And paste the Telegram API token into ManyChat (from the previous step):

And that’s it! Now your ManyChat account is connected to your Telegram bot!

Pro Tip: If you want to create a chatbot for a Telegram platform, you need to use a different platform than Manychat. This is because Manychat doesn’t support this. In that case, I recommend going with Sendpulse.

Step 7: Set Up Auto Replies

We have linked our Manychat account to our Telegram bot. Now, it’s time to use our Telegram bot to automatically answer questions.

Basically, we can create our own customer service bot in Telegram.

To answer our first question, just go to Automation and click on New flow:

Let’s say, we have a course and we want to automatically reply to questions people have about our course.

Then, we need to add a Starting Step to our ManyChat flow, which is also called a Trigger.

And a trigger, is something that starts our flow inside Telegram.

And in this case, we want to start the flow when a message contains the word “course”.

So, you can just click on Add Trigger:

Choose for Telegram (on the left side) and then click on “User sends a message with a Keyword”:

Then, you can click on the keyword and just type in “course” and click on Create:

Now, every time someone messages us a phrase with the word “course” in it, we automatically reply with this ManyChat flow.

Then, as a first step, we will choose Telegram:

P.S. I also have a lot of other channels here, such as WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS, because I also connected these channels to my ManyChat account.

And then answer the question by typing in the following message:

My course is called the Lead Generation System, where you can learn how to automatically generate leads for your business.

If you want to sign up for my course or want more information, please click the button below👇

And we can also add a button that will lead to a page on your website.

So you can just click on Add button, determine the Button title, set it to Open website and add the URL to your website:

Now, every time someone asks a question about our course, we automatically answer that question + a link to your website.

After you answer someone’s question, check if it actually helped.

So then, we can add a new message to this flow and ask if we answered their question with two buttons:

And if they click on “Yes, thank you”, we just thank them:

And if they click on the “No” button, we ask if they want to be connected with a customer support agent:

That’s another great feature of Manychat. Manychat has a built-in live chat to hand over conversations from your bot to a live chat agent.

To connect someone with a live chat agent, we first tell the person that we are going to connect them to an agent.

And then we need to add an action to our Manychat flow:

And choose for “Live Chat” and click on Mark conversation as Open:

In Manychat, you have two types of conversations:

1. Closed conversations, which are conversations handled by your chatbot
2. Open conversations, these are conversations handled by your live chat agents

So that’s why we need to Mark the Conversation as Open, so one of your live chat agents can pick it up.

Then, we can assign a live chat agent by adding another action called Assign Conversation:

And select the team member or group you want to assign to this conversation:

And lastly, we need to add the action Notify Assignees. This will notify the agents assigned to this conversation:

And that’s it!

So by using this flow in Manychat, we can:

• Automatically answer a question in Telegram with our bot
• Ask if we answered the question of the user
• If we didn’t answer the question, connect them with one of our live chat agents

And you set up these flows for each and every question you want to answer with your chatbot!

Step 8: Add AI to Your Telegram Chatbot

The next step is to turn our bot into an AI Telegram Bot.

Default Telegram bots can answer simple questions if you use the right words, but they cannot understand language.

An AI Bot in Telegram can understand language. We can train it on our data and give it custom instructions. Then, the AI chatbot can automatically answer questions about our business.

Since Manychat’s AI isn’t that great, we will use Relevance AI together with Manychat.

Relevance AI is an AI tool you can use to train AI agents on your data (like your website or documents). And it can also take actions, like booking appointments or tracking orders.

Once you’ve trained it, it can automatically answer questions from customers.

It even comes with a free plan, and if you need more, their paid plans starts at just $19/month.

So just click the button below to create your free Relevance AI account:

Create Relevance AI account (Free)

And click on Sign Up:

Once you’re logged in, click on Agents and select New Agent:

Next, click on Give agent knowledge so we can train our AI agent on our data:

Now, we can upload a document about our business. For example, you could use this document that has information on an eCommerce business:

And then upload the document to Relevance AI:

And select Allow agent to search:

This lets the agent be more efficient, by only searching information that is related to a question.

Once the document has been uploaded and trained, click on Save changes in the top-right:

Next, we can give the AI agent a name and prompt, so it knows how to respond to questions:

Now, your AI Agent has been created and ready to answer questions! You ca njust click on Run and directly talk to it:

So what we need to do now is that every time someone messages your Telegram chatbot, we need to send the message to Relevance.

And then Relevance gives the answer to the question and we send it back to Manychat.

To create this integration, we will be using Make.

Make is an integration platform to connect applications without using any code. And we will use it to connect Manychat to Relevance AI.

If you haven’t used Make before, just click on the button below to get 30 Days Make Pro for Free (only if you click on the button!):

Get 30 Days Make Pro for Free

This might sound like a lot, but I actually have created a step-by-step video on how you can connect Manychat to Relevance AI using Make:

So let’s create this in Manychat.

In Manychat, go to Settings and click on Telegram:

Here, you will find the Default Reply. This is the automation that triggers if someone sends a message (and it’s not triggered by another automation).

Then, click on Select Existing and select the Default Reply automation that is part of my template (you can download below!). It looks like this:

There are three important things with the automation. First, the trigger needs to be set to Every time so it will trigger every time someone asks a question:

Next, we save the Last User Input to a custom field in Manychat, which is called “Relevance AI > Question”.

And lastly, we send the question to Relevance via Make.

Here’s what the integration in Make looks like:

This scenario works in four steps:

1. The scenario starts when it gets data from Manychat
2. Then, it sends the question to Relevance and the AI agent gives an answer
3. We store the answer of Relevance in a Manychat custom field (called “Relevance AI > Answer”)
4. And we send a Manychat automation

We send a “Relevance AI > Answer” automation in Manychat, which is also a part of my free template!

This automation gives the answer from Relevance. It then asks the user if it answered their question.

And if it doesn’t answer the question, we send them to a live chat agent.

Now, you only have to click on Set Live and your Telegram AI chatbot is live!