Let a bot answer chats on your own Telegram account

What Telegram Business is

Telegram Business is a set of features for people who use their personal account for work. It's part of Telegram Premium, so you need an active Premium subscription to use it.

The feature that matters here is chatbots. Telegram Business lets you connect a bot to your personal account. Once connected, the bot can read incoming private chats and reply to them for you. Your customers keep writing to the same account they always have. They don't need to find or start a separate bot.

That's the main difference from a normal bot. A regular contact bot is its own account: customers open the bot and write to it. A business chatbot works inside your account, in chats people started with you. If you're not sure which you need, the short answer is:

• Customers already message your personal account and you don't want to move them: use a business chatbot.
• You want to keep your personal account private, or a team needs to answer: use a separate contact bot.

How to connect a chatbot to your account

You need two things: Telegram Premium, and a bot that's built to work as a business chatbot. Not every bot is. A bot has to support business connections to reply on your behalf.

1. Create the bot. With Echo Maker, open @mkfrbot, choose the auto-reply (Account Manager) template, and paste a token from @BotFather. If you need a token first, see how to get a bot token.
2. Set up its replies: a welcome message, a few keyword replies, and, if you want, AI replies.
3. In Telegram, open Settings → Telegram Business → Chatbots.
4. Choose your bot there to link it to your account.
5. Ask a friend to send you a test message, and check what the bot replies.

With this template, only the bot's owner can link it to an account. If someone else tries, the attempt is refused and you're told about it. That matters, because a business chatbot can read the chats it's connected to. Only connect bots you control or fully trust.

The 24-hour reply window

A business chatbot can reply in a private chat only if that chat had an incoming message in the last 24 hours. In plain terms: the bot answers people who just wrote to you. It can't start conversations, and it can't send a message to a customer who wrote to you last week.

What this means in practice:

• It's not a broadcast tool. You can't use a business chatbot to send a promotion to everyone in your chat list.
• Follow-ups have limits. If you promise "I'll send the details tomorrow", the bot won't be able to do it once the 24 hours run out unless the customer writes again. Send it yourself.
• It reacts, it doesn't chase. That's a good thing for your customers, and the reason business bots don't become spam.

If you want to message a list of customers who agreed to hear from you, a separate bot with a broadcast feature is the right tool. See how to message all your users without losing them.

What to automate and what to answer yourself

The best business chatbots handle the boring, predictable part of a conversation and hand everything else to you. A simple rule: automate facts, answer judgement calls yourself.

Keyword replies are the safest start. In the auto-reply template, you pick a word and the reply it triggers. A tutor might set "price" to send the lesson rates, and "schedule" to send this month's free slots as a photo. Keyword replies only fire when a message contains one of your words, so everything else waits for you, unless you've also turned on AI replies.

The welcome message is the other easy win. It goes to people writing for the first time, and it should set expectations: who they've reached, what you usually reply about, and roughly when you'll answer. You can also turn on the "typing…" indicator while the bot replies.

Also think about your personal contacts. If friends and family write to the same account, a welcome message or a keyword reply can reach them too. Pick keywords that customers use and friends don't, and test with someone you know.

AI replies: useful, but check them

The auto-reply template can also answer with AI, using ChatGPT or Gemini and your own API key. Any cost is billed by that provider. You can give the AI your own instructions, such as your prices, opening hours and the services you offer, so its answers are about your business.

AI replies handle questions you didn't predict, in a natural tone. The trade-off is that the AI writes in your chat, under your name, and it can be wrong. It might:

• Quote an old price, or invent one when your instructions don't cover the question
• Agree to a discount, a date or a refund you never offered
• Misunderstand a joke, a complaint or a message in slang

To keep AI replies safe, write your instructions like a short policy: what to answer, what to never promise, and what to say when unsure (for example, "I'll pass this to the owner"). Then read the bot's conversations for the first few days. Fix your instructions each time you see a bad answer.

Don't pretend to be human

Because the replies arrive in the chat a customer opened with you, many people will assume you typed them. That's where a helpful tool can turn into a trust problem. If someone finds out that the "you" they've been chatting with was a bot, and especially if the bot promised something you won't honour, they'll feel misled.

Be upfront. Tell people in the welcome message that an assistant answers first, and that you'll reply yourself to anything it can't handle. Something like: "Hi, this is an automatic reply. Here are our hours and prices. For anything else, write your question and I'll answer personally today." Customers are fine with automation when it's honest and quick. They're not fine with being fooled.

Finally, check your chats every day. A business chatbot helps you reply faster. It doesn't replace reading your messages. If you need several people to answer, or want your personal account out of the picture entirely, move to a contact bot with a team inbox, as described in how to run customer support on Telegram with a bot.