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Telegram has no separate business app. Companies talk to their contacts through a Telegram bot: an account you create in Telegram with @BotFather. You connect that bot to Keloa, and every private chat with it arrives in your inbox as a conversation. Your AI agent answers, and teammates can step in at any time. Contacts find your bot by its @username or its t.me link, and they always send the first message.

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Prerequisites

  • A Telegram account (the app on your phone or desktop, or Telegram Web).
  • A Keloa workspace on Growth or higher, and the owner or admin role.
Telegram bots have their own limit. They don’t count against your plan’s channels cap. Bots you already connected keep working after a downgrade; only connecting a new one is blocked.

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Create your Telegram bot

Skip this part if your company already has a Telegram bot.
1

Open BotFather

In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather, Telegram’s official tool for creating bots.
2

Create the bot

Send /newbot and pick a name, for example your company name. Contacts see this name at the top of the chat.
3

Pick a username

Pick a username that ends in bot, like acme_support_bot. It becomes your public link: t.me/acme_support_bot.
4

Copy the token

BotFather replies with a token: numbers, a colon, then letters. Copy it. You paste it into Keloa in the next section.
The token gives full control of the bot. Treat it like a password: never post it in a chat, an email or a screenshot. Keloa stores it encrypted and never shows it again.
Already have a bot? In BotFather, send /mybots, pick your bot and tap API Token to see its current token. Don’t send /token or tap Revoke current token unless you mean to: both create a new token and stop the old one immediately, wherever it runs. If you revoke the token of a connected bot, Keloa stops receiving its messages until you paste the new token under Replace a token.

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Connect Telegram

1

Open the integration

Sidebar → Integrations → Telegram → Connect.
2

Paste the token

Paste the bot token into Bot token. Keloa checks it with Telegram right away; click Check token to check again, or Show token to see what you pasted.
3

Check the preview

Keloa shows the bot it found, with its name and @username. Make sure it’s the right bot.
4

Name it (optional)

Name in Keloa is only for your team, for example “Support NL”. Contacts always see the bot’s own name.
5

Pick the AI agent

Under Answered by, pick the AI agent that replies to this bot, or No AI agent (your team answers).
6

Connect

Click Connect. The bot appears in the Telegram panel with its t.me link and a QR code.
Add another bot. Once a bot is connected, Integrations → Telegram opens the Telegram panel. Click Add bot to connect the next one. The panel shows how many bots your plan allows, for example “1 of 3 bots on your plan”.
“This bot is connected to another tool.” A Telegram bot delivers its messages to one place only. If the bot is already used by another tool (a chatbot builder, your own script), Keloa shows where its messages go now. Tick Move this bot to Keloa to connect anyway: messages then come to Keloa, and the other tool stops receiving them.

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How contacts reach you

  • Share your bot’s link, https://t.me/<username>, on your website, in emails or on social media. The Telegram panel in Keloa has a Copy link button and a QR code for print.
  • Contacts can also search for your bot’s @username in Telegram.
  • A contact opens the chat, taps Start and writes. A bot can’t start a chat itself, so the contact always writes first.
  • Telegram has no 24-hour reply window. You and your AI agent can reply to a contact at any time, as long as they haven’t blocked the bot.
Keloa only handles private chats. If someone adds your bot to a group, the bot leaves the group.

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Test it

1

Open the test panel

In Integrations → Telegram, click Test it on your bot.
2

Message your bot

Scan the QR code with your phone, or click Open in Telegram or Open Telegram Web. Tap Start, then send a message, for example “Hi”.
3

Check the inbox

The panel shows Message received! with a link to the conversation. Your AI agent’s answer is there too (if an AI agent answers this bot).

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What the AI does

  • One AI agent per bot. The agent you picked under Answered by answers every chat with that bot. Change it any time on the bot’s card, or from the agent editor: Channels → Social channels → Telegram → Bind to this agent. With No AI agent, your team answers every chat.
  • Greeting on Start. When a contact taps Start, the bot sends the AI agent’s greeting: the one shown in the agent editor. It goes out at most once a day per chat and doesn’t count toward your plan’s replies. With No AI agent, or while the AI agent isn’t live, no greeting is sent.
  • The conversation starts when the contact writes. Tapping Start alone doesn’t open a conversation in your inbox. Once the contact sends a real message, the conversation appears with a “started the chat” line, the greeting they saw, and their message.
  • The whole conversation as context. The AI agent reads the full conversation, not only the latest message. See Conversation memory.
  • One answer per burst. When a contact sends several messages in a row, or a photo album, the AI agent waits a few seconds and answers once, to their latest message.
  • Telegram formatting. Replies support bold, italic, code and links. Headings become bold text and tables become simple rows that read well on a phone.
  • Long answers are split into several Telegram messages, about a second apart, so they arrive in order.
  • Commands. Only /start is special. Anything else a contact sends, /help included, reaches the AI agent as a normal message.
Teammates reply from the inbox as on any other channel. The conversation header shows which bot the chat came in on (“via @username”), and the reply box counts up to 4,096 characters per Telegram message; longer replies are split automatically. While the AI agent writes, the contact sees “typing…” in Telegram.

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Messages and media

Contacts can send:
  • 20 MB per file. Telegram lets bots download files up to 20 MB. A larger file shows as too large in the conversation; ask the contact to send it another way.
  • Daily download limit. Each workspace can download a set amount of Telegram files per day (2 GB by default). Past it, files show “Not downloaded: this workspace reached today’s Telegram download limit.” The messages themselves still arrive.
  • Unsafe file types (for example programs and scripts) are never stored. The conversation says the file type isn’t shown for security reasons.
  • Edits. When a contact edits a message, Keloa updates it in the conversation and marks it Edited. Hover the label to see the earlier text. The AI agent doesn’t answer an edit again.
  • Replies and forwards. When a contact replies to an earlier message, Keloa shows the quoted message. Forwarded messages show who they came from.
  • Outbound is text only. You and your AI agent send text messages. Sending files or GIFs to Telegram isn’t supported.
  • Flood guard. If one chat sends more than 30 messages in a minute, Keloa keeps the text but skips the files and the AI answer for those messages, and the conversation waits for a teammate.

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Blocked bots and inbox banners

A contact can block your bot in Telegram. When they do:
  • The conversation shows a banner, and the reply box is locked.
  • The AI agent stops answering that conversation.
  • A reply sent just before Keloa learned about the block shows as Not delivered.
Once the contact unblocks the bot and writes again, the banner disappears and you can reply as usual. Conversations also show a banner when something is wrong with the bot itself:

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Satisfaction surveys

Keloa can ask Telegram contacts to rate the conversation after you resolve it. The contact gets a Telegram message with your question and five faces to tap; each face opens the short rating page. Telegram has no reply window, so any survey delay works. Turn Telegram surveys on or off in Settings → Customer satisfaction → Channels. Results show up in CSAT next to your other channels.

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Replace a token

Replace the token when you revoked it in BotFather, or when the bot’s card says Token revoked.
1

Get the current token

In BotFather, send /mybots, pick your bot and tap API Token. Copy the token shown there.
2

Paste it in Keloa

In Integrations → Telegram, click Replace token on the bot’s card, paste the token and click Update token.
Messages flow again right away. The token must belong to the same bot: a token of another bot is refused. Replacing a token doesn’t count against your plan’s bot limit.

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The bot’s card

Each bot’s card shows its status: Keloa checks every bot automatically every few hours. Click Check connection on the card to check right away. When the token stops working, another tool takes over the bot, or the bot is moved to another Keloa workspace, the workspace owners also get an email. If another tool took over the bot, the card offers Move back to Keloa. That tool then stops receiving the bot’s messages.

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Disconnecting

Integrations → Telegram → Disconnect on the bot’s card. Keloa tells Telegram to stop sending the bot’s messages to Keloa and deletes the stored token, so messages stop arriving immediately. The bot itself stays in Telegram, and existing conversations stay in your inbox. To delete the bot completely, use /deletebot in BotFather.

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Troubleshooting