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Running an AnroAgents agent on Telegram

Running your AnroAgents agent on your own Telegram bot.

An AnroAgents agent can answer in Telegram as well as on your website. The bot is yours: you create it in Telegram's BotFather, and AnroAgents runs your agent behind it. The Telegram channel is available on the paid AnroAgents plans.

The agent behaves the same way it does in the widget. It answers from the same Knowledge Base, qualifies the person it is talking to using the same framework, and books meetings into the same Google Calendar. Nothing is configured twice.

Connecting a bot

Create the bot first. Open Telegram, message @BotFather, send /newbot, and follow the prompts to pick a name and a username. BotFather replies with a token that looks like 123456789:AAExample-TokenGoesHere.

Paste that token into the Telegram section of your agent in AnroAgents. It is on the agent's edit screen, under Integrations, above the webhooks. The agent has to be saved before a bot can be connected to it, because AnroAgents points Telegram at a web address that contains the agent's id. The token is checked against Telegram, encrypted, and pointed at AnroAgents straight away — after that it is never shown again, and AnroAgents displays only the bot's @-name and the last few characters so you can tell which bot is connected.

A bot can serve exactly one AnroAgents agent. If you have several agents, create a separate bot for each.

AnroAgents never shows the token again after it is saved, so keep BotFather's message if you want your own copy. If you lose it, generate a new token in BotFather and paste that one instead.

What a visitor sees

A visitor opens the bot in Telegram, sends a message, and the agent replies. There is no greeting until they write first — Telegram does not allow a bot to open a conversation with someone who has not contacted it.

Everything in one Telegram chat is a single continuing AnroAgents conversation. A Telegram chat has no equivalent of closing a browser tab, so a person who comes back a month later carries on where they left off, and the agent keeps what it already learned about them.

Long answers are split across several messages, because Telegram refuses anything over 4096 characters.

Group chats

Your bot can answer in a Telegram group as well as in a one-to-one chat, but not until you say so. Anyone who knows a bot's @-name can add it to a group without asking you, so a group the bot is added to appears in the Telegram section of the agent with no decision made, and the bot answers nothing there until you approve it. You are notified when a group shows up.

The bot does post one line in the group when it first arrives, saying it is not switched on there yet and that its owner has to approve it. That line is fixed text — it is not the agent answering, it costs nothing against your message allowance, and it is sent once. Without it the silence looks like a bot that is simply broken, to the group and usually to whoever added it.

Both of the lines the bot says about itself in a group are written in the agent's default language rather than any one member's — a group has no single visitor to follow. See Languages and translation.

Approving a group is the only thing that lets the agent speak in it, and the group is told once when you do, along with how to address the bot. Blocking a group leaves the bot in it without answering; removing the bot from the group in Telegram is a separate action and is yours to take there.

In an approved group the agent answers only when it is spoken to — mentioned by @-name, or replied to. Everything else said in the room is ignored. A mention with nothing else in it gets no reply, because there is no question in it.

The agent's own message limits still apply, and one group is additionally limited to twenty answers an hour so that a single busy room cannot spend a month of your allowance in an afternoon.

What the agent does not do in a group

A group is a room of people, and everything the agent does beyond answering assumes it is talking to one person. So in a group it answers from the Knowledge Base and does nothing else:

• It does not book meetings.
• It does not send email. In particular it never reuses an address someone gave it earlier — in a room that address belongs to a different person from the one asking.
• It does not qualify or score anyone. A group conversation does not appear as a lead.
• It does not hand over to a person. Someone who wants your team should message the bot directly.

Meetings, email, qualification and handoff all still work in one-to-one chats with the same bot. Approving a group changes nothing about how the bot behaves in private.

What is not in the Telegram channel

An AnroAgents agent in Telegram does not receive photos, voice notes or files. Those messages are ignored rather than answered as though they had been read.

Live handoff works in Telegram. A visitor who asks for a person is told someone will follow up, and an operator replying from the AnroAgents Inbox reaches the Telegram chat — including images, which arrive as photos. The visitor is also told when an operator joins, when the conversation returns to the assistant and when it is closed.

The lines about an operator joining and leaving follow the language the visitor is writing in, which Telegram reports along with each message. If it does not, they follow the agent's default language, and anything outside the seventeen languages covered falls back to English. This is the same everywhere the platform speaks to a visitor in its own voice — see Languages and translation.

Proactive triggers do not apply. They react to behaviour on a web page — time on page, scroll depth, exit intent — and there is no page in Telegram.

The pre-chat form does not apply either; there is no form to show before a Telegram conversation starts.

Asking the AnroAgents support bot about your own account

The AnroAgents support bot in Telegram can answer questions about your own AnroAgents account — which plan you are on, how many messages you have used this month, how many remain, when the subscription renews — once you have linked the chat to your account.

Linking starts in the dashboard, not in the chat. Open Settings, find the support chat link section and press Link Telegram. That opens the bot with a one-time secret attached; the bot confirms and the chat is linked from then on. The secret works once and expires after fifteen minutes, and generating a new link invalidates any earlier one you did not use.

Linking has to start from the dashboard because a chat is the one place an identity claim cannot be checked. Anyone can type anyone's email address into a conversation. Starting from a session you are already signed in to is what makes the link mean something.

Once linked, the bot sees your account and nobody else's. There is no way to ask it about another account: the lookup takes no argument, so neither you nor anyone who gets hold of the chat can point it elsewhere. It never sees your payment details, your invoices or your contact information — only the plan and usage figures listed above. Every lookup is recorded.

One AnroAgents account can have one Telegram chat linked to it. Linking a new chat unlinks the previous one, and the previous chat is told so — if the person doing the linking is not the person holding the old chat, that message is how the old one finds out. This matters because a Telegram account is tied to a phone number and phone numbers get reissued: a link that outlived the phone would eventually belong to a stranger.

Unlink from the same place in Settings, and it takes effect immediately. Do that if you change phone, lose a device, or someone else gains access to the Telegram account.

The bot never does this in a group. A group has several people in it and an account belongs to one of them.

The same questions can be asked in the dashboard itself, under Support, where no linking is needed — you are already signed in there, and that is the proof.

Messages and billing

Telegram messages count against the same monthly allowance as the widget. There is no separate Telegram charge and no separate limit — one plan, one allowance, whichever channel the conversation happens in.

Disconnecting

Disconnect from the same screen. AnroAgents tells Telegram to stop sending updates and deletes the stored token; the bot itself stays yours and keeps existing in Telegram until you delete it in BotFather.

If you revoke the token in BotFather without disconnecting in AnroAgents, the next message reveals that the token no longer works: the channel switches itself off and you get a notification explaining why.