AI assistants for Telegram

Anyone can ship one, and that cuts both ways

A bot is registered by messaging @BotFather and pointing it at a server. There is no review, no business verification and no partner programme, which is the opposite of both other channels: iMessage’s official route is closed to new partners and WhatsApp’s runs on Meta’s approval. It shows in who turns up. Two of the eight listings here are agents you run on your own machine, a quarter of the channel and the highest share anywhere in this directory. What you give up is any filter at all on who else is here.

Messaging costs nothing until you want to message everybody

Telegram charges nothing to message the people who started your bot. The limits are rate limits rather than prices: one message a second in a single chat, twenty a minute in a group, and around thirty a second across a broadcast. Past that a bot can pay for volume, up to a thousand a second at 0.1 Stars a message, but only once it holds 100,000 Stars and has 100,000 monthly active users. For anything at the scale of the products on this page, the channel is free.

In a group, a bot is deaf by default

Privacy mode is on unless somebody turns it off, and a bot in that state sees only commands aimed at it, replies to its own messages, and a plain /start if it was the last bot to speak. Turn it off, or make the bot an admin, and it reads everything anybody says in that group. There is no middle setting. That is the decision to look at before adding one of these to a thread with other people in it, and it is a sharper one than any of the other channels asks you to make.

Two agents cannot hear each other

A bot never receives messages from another bot, in any mode, deliberately: Telegram made the rule so that two of them cannot get stuck in a loop. Whatever agent-to-agent behaviour the products on this page describe, it does not happen inside a Telegram group.