A Telegram bot lets you message contacts for free, with no phone numbers or carrier fees involved. Contacts find your bot by its username and start the conversation themselves, and can reply by tapping buttons as well as by sending text, photos, voice notes and locations.

Before you start

You'll need a Telegram account and a bot of your own. Bots are created by chatting with BotFather in the Telegram app, which gives you a token for your bot when you're done. Telegram's guide to creating a new bot walks you through it.

Keep your token private, as anyone who has it can control your bot.

Adding the channel

Go to Settings > Channels and click New Channel. Telegram is under Social & Chat, or you can type its name in the search box.

Enter your bot's token in the Authentication Token field and click Add Channel. There's nothing more to set up on Telegram's side.

Considerations

Contacts start a conversation with your bot by tapping Start, which sends it the /start command. To greet them, e.g. with a registration flow, create a keyword trigger for "start".

A bot can't message someone first. Contacts need to have started a conversation with it before you can send them messages.

Try it out

We've created an example bot about cats that you can talk to. Search for Purrington in Telegram and send "start", or open it here.

To learn more about channels in general, see Introduction to Channels.