How To Create a Telegram Chatbot For Free

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By Joren Wouters Updated on

Did you know that Telegram has grown from 200 to 800 million active monthly users in just 2 years?

Businesses have noticed this. And they are using Telegram chatbots to boost sales.

36% of companies use chatbots to get more leads. And business leaders claim that chatbots can raise sales by 67%.

You want to get in on the action? Smart choice.

In this Telegram chatbot tutorial, I will explain:

And you’ll even get access to my FREE template so you can just copy-and-paste it, and don’t have to build it from scratch.

You may just be curious about Telegram chatbots. Or, you may want to use them to grow your business. Either way, you’ll love this guide.

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What is a Telegram Bot?

Telegram bot is a computer program that automatically replies to messages on Telegram.

It’s like a robot that can chat with people all day and night, without getting tired. Telegram bots work 24/7 and can have conversations with several people, at the same time.

With a chatbot in Telegram, you can:

  • Automatically answer questions from customers. For example, if someone wants to know about a product or service, the chatbot can give them the answer right away.
  • Send notifications of new products and details of your company
  • Remind people of upcoming events and meetings

In short, a Telegram chatbot is like a friendly robot. It’s always ready to chat, help, and give information to people using the Telegram app. It makes things easier and faster, especially for businesses and their customers.

How to use a Telegram Bot

Here’s how to use a Telegram bot in 3 simple steps:

First, open the Telegram app on your phone or desktop. Then, search for the Telegram Bot in the top-left corner (for example: “Eddy Travels”):

Search for a bot in the Telegram app

Then, click on the Start button to start a conversation with the Telegram Bot:

Start a conversation with a Telegram Bot

And now you can use the Telegram bot however you like:

telegram-chatbot-example

How do Telegram bots work?

Users can interact wiht Telegram bots by sending messages and clicking buttons. When they do that, the bot will respond automatically.

Telegram bots use conversational flows and artificial intelligence.

Let’s cover them one-by-one.

Conversational flows

Telegram bots can be created by Telegram bot builders, such as Manychat.

And these Telegram builders use a conversational flow to design the conversations.

Each conversational flows consists of three elements:

  1. Trigger: Tells the chatbot when to start a conversation
  2. Action: Tells the chatbot what to do (for example: send a message)
  3. Condition: Performs checks based on if this, then that logic

For example, if I start my own Telegram business chatbot, you will get the following response:

telegram-business-bot

And here’s how that looks in ManyChat (the Telegram chatbot builder I’ve used):

how-telegram-bots-work

How it works:

  1. If someone types a message containing “Hey”, “Hi”, or “Hello”, the chatbot replies with this flow (the trigger)
  2. The chatbot first checks if the user is a new user or has talked with my chatbot before (the condition)
  3. And if the user is new, we send the first message (above). Otherwise, we send the second message (the actions)

Pretty simple, right?

But there’s something that we can add to the mix: Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence in Telegram bots

With AI, we can train our chatbot on our data and give it specific instructions. Then, it can automatically answer questions about our business.

For example, with an AI tool like Chatbase, we can train a chatbot on our website:

Train your chatbot on knowledge base sources with Chatbase

And then it can automatically answer questions about our website:

Chat logs of each conversation in Chatbase

And later in this Telegram Bot tutorial, I will explain how you can create your own AI Telegram Bot!

Benefits of using Telegram chatbots

Telegram chatbots can be super helpful for your business. Here are the main benefits of using a Telegram chatbot:

Quick answers to questions

Telegram chatbots provide instant responses to customer inquiries, at any time any day. This eliminates the need for customers to wait for a human agent. It results in quicker, more efficient service and an improved overall customer experience.

Available 24/7

Chatbots, unlike humans, don’t require rest or breaks. They are available 24/7, offering assistance and answers at any time, including holidays and outside of regular business hours.

Send promotions

Unlike other channels (like WhatsApp and Instagram), Telegram has no specific rules about sending promotions. That doesn’t mean you should spam your customers, but it gives you more flexibility.

With Telegram, you can send promotions of new deals any time you want.

What is a Telegram Bot used for?

A Telegram bot is used for 3 things:

  • Automatically answer questions from customers
  • Manage a Telegram Group
  • And boost the sales of a business

Let’s cover them one-by-one.

Telegram Customer Service Bot

A Customer Support Bot is a Telegram Bot that answers questions from customers automatically.

And this has many benefits:

  • Your customers get an instant reply to their questions. This happens even outside business hours, which improves customer satisfaction.
  • You can save on labor costs, because a Telegram chatbot can answer most of the questions your customers will ask
  • You can handle thousands of questions at the same time

Here’s an example of a Support Bot on Telegram: my own chatbot. You can just ask a question and it will automatically give the answer to your question:

Example of a Support Bot on Telegram.

Telegram Chatbots for Groups

With a Telegram Group Bot, you can automatically manage a Telegram group.

A Telegram Group Bot can:

  • Greet new users that enter the Telegram group
  • Answer questions that are asked in the Telegram Group
  • Ban users that use swear words

And much more.

Sales Chatbot on Telegram

With a Sales Bot on Telegram, you can boost the sales of your company.

For example, the Telegram bot Eddy Travels helps you with:

  • Searching for flights
  • Find accomodations and hotels
  • And plan your vacations

You can try it out yourself by talking to Eddie Travels using this link:

telegram-chatbot-example

Another way to boost your sales using a Telegram bot, is by sending mass messages to your Telegram contacts:

Example of a Sales Bot on Telegram

How to Create a Telegram Bot for Your Business

Step 1: Go to Telegram and talk to the BotFather

Open the Telegram app on your phone or computer, search for Botfather and start a conversation by clicking on the Start button:

Start a conversation with the Botfather to create a Telegram bot

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”:

Create a new bot with the Botfather on Telegram

Step 3: Give a Name for 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”:

Give your Telegram Bot a Name

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:

Give your Telegram Bot a Username

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

Step 5: Generate and use the Telegram API token

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

Copy the Telegram API token you get from the Botfather

NOTEDon’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 the chat automation platform I’ve used for my own 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)

Create Free Manychat Account

Your Discount Code

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Copied!

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

manychat-get-started-free

Click on Telegram:

manychat-sign-up-telegram

And log in with your Telegram account:

manychat-continue-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:

manychat-telegram-connect

And click on Create new bot:

manychat-telegram-create-new-bot

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

manychat-telegram-bot-token

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

P.S. If you want to make a chatbot for a Telegram group, you need to use a platform other than Manychat. This is because Manychat doesn’t support this functionality. Here is a video on how you can create one with Xenioo, that does have this functionality.

Auto Reply to Messages on Telegram

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:

manychat-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:

manychat-add-trigger

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

Add the Telegram keyword trigger to your Manychat flow

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

manychat-telegram-keyword-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:

manychat-telegram-first-step

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👇

manychat-telegram-message-contents

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:

manychat-telegram-add-button-website

P.S. I actually do have a course called the Lead Generation Funnel. In it, you can learn how to use ManyChat to generate leads for your business. You can check it out here.

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

And after you answered someone’s question, you want to check if your answer actually answered their question.

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

Ask if a question has been answered by your Telegram bot

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

Thank someone if you answered their question with the Telegram bot

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

Ask if the person wants to be connected to a live chat 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:

Add an action in the Manychat flow for your Telegram Bot

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

Add the action Mark Conversation as Open in Manychat

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:

Add the action Assign Conversation in Manychat

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

Assign the conversation to a specific team member or group

And lastly, we need to add the action Notify Assignees, which will send a notification to the agents that are assigned to this conversation:

Add the Notify Assignee action in Manychat

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

Complete Manychat flow for your Telegram chatbot

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

How to Live Chat with a Telegram Bot

If a Telegram contact wants to talk with a support agent, you will automatically get a notification and email from Manychat.

If you click on the View on Manychat button, you will directly go to the specific conversation in Live Chat:

Example of an email notification in Manychat

And here you can just have a conversation with your Telegram contact and answer any questions that person might have:

Live chat conversation in Manychat

And once you’ve answered all questions, you can end the conversation and click on the Mark as Closed button at the top:

Close a Telegram Livechat Conversation in Manychat

How to 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.

To add AI to our chatbot, we will use Chatbase, because Manychat doesn’t have built-in AI.

Chatbase is an AI tool that you can train on your own data, such as your website and documents. And it already starts at $19 a month, which is really cheap.

So just click on the button below to create your Chatbase account:

Create Chatbase account

Then, you can create a new chatbot by clicking on New Chatbot:

Create a new chatbot in Chatbase

Upload the document you want to train your chatbot on:

Upload a document to Chatbase

By the way, I am using a document for an eCommerce business. It contains info about returns, delivery, and warranty (and is also in my free template)

And then click on Create chatbot to create your chatbot in Chatbase:

Create your chatbot in Chatbase

Now, your chatbot has been created and you can talk to it in Chatbase:

Example of an Ecommerce chatbot in Chatbase

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

And then Chatbase gives the answer to the question and we send the answer 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 Chatbase.

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 a step-by-step tutorial on how you can set up the integration between Manychat and Chatbase via Make:

So let’s create this in Manychat.

In Manychat, go to Settings and click on Telegram:

Default Reply settings for Telegram in Manychat

Here, you can find the Default Reply. The Default Reply in Manychat is the automation that will be triggered if no other automation is triggered when someone sends a message.

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

Default Reply of an AI Telegram Bot in Manychat

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:

Default Reply in Manychat that is set to everytime

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

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

In Make we have the following scenario:

Manychat and Chatbase integration via Make

This scenario works in four steps:

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

The automation that we send in Manychat is the “Chatbase – Answer” automation (also part of my free template):

AI chatbase answer flow in Telegram chatbot

This automation gives the answer from Chatbase and asks if it answered the question from the user.

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!

Example of an AI Telegram chatbot

Free Telegram Chatbot Template

That’s how you make your own Telegram chatbot!

And if you just fill in the form below, you will get my Telegram chatbot template for free 👇

Telegram Chatbot Template

Conclusion

In this guide, I’ve shown you how to make your own Telegram chatbot, a tool that can chat, answer questions, and help your business, all without needing to code. We covered what these chatbots are, how they work, and gave you easy steps to create one. Plus, you get a free template to make starting even easier.

Chatbots are great for quick replies. They can handle many chats at once. This makes them perfect for businesses that want to improve customer service and boost sales. So, if you’re interested in making your Telegram chatbot, this guide has everything you need to get started!

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Telegram allow bots?

Yes, Telegram lets you use bots. They are a big part of Telegram and help with many tasks.

What do Telegram ChatBots do?

Telegram bots can do lots of things like answer questions, manage tasks, or even play games with you.

Are Telegram bots safe?

Telegram bots are usually safe, but you should be careful. Don’t share personal info with unknown bots.

What are the disadvantages of a Telegram Chatbot?

Telegram bots might not understand complex questions. Sometimes, they can’t replace talking to a real person.

Are There Any Precautions to Take When Creating a Telegram ChatBot?

When making a Telegram bot, be sure to keep it simple and clear. Also, make sure it respects user privacy and follows Telegram’s rules.

Can Telegram ChatBots work in different languages?

Yes, bots can be programmed to work in many languages, helping people from different places communicate easily.

How to create a Telegram bot that replies?

You can create a Telegram bot that replies in a few simple steps:

  1. Go to Telegram and talk to the Botfather
  2. Create a New Bot using “/newbot” command
  3. Give a Name for your Telegram Bot
  4. Choose a Username for your Telegram Bot
  5. Generate and use the Telegram API Token
  6. Create a free Manychat account and connect it to Telegram
  7. Create your chatbot flow

Comments (2)

  1. Priya Sharma

    Hi Joren! this really an amazing article, I was looking for something like this & truly feel glad to spend time on your blog. I am surely going to try these tips. Thanks for sharing.

    1. Joren Wouters

      Glad you liked it!

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