Your chatbot, answering inside Telegram
Create a bot with @BotFather, paste its token into WhisperChat, and anyone can message your chatbot in Telegram. Answers come from the same knowledge base as your website widget, arrive with their sources, and are logged in your dashboard no bot process to host and no webhook to wire up by hand.
- A WhisperChat chatbot that has been trained at least once Telegram answers come from the same knowledge base as your website widget.
- A Telegram account, so you can talk to @BotFather and create the bot.
- Nothing to install or host. WhisperChat registers the webhook with Telegram for you.
Set it up in six steps
Everything below happens in two places: @BotFather in Telegram and your chatbot's Deploy page in WhisperChat.
- 1
Create the bot with @BotFather
Open @BotFather in Telegram and send /newbot. It asks for a display name and then for a username, which must end in “bot”. That username is the public handle people will search for.
Open @BotFather - 2
Copy the API token
BotFather replies with a token that looks like 123456789:AAF…. Copy it. If it ever leaks, send /revoke to BotFather and re-connect in WhisperChat with the new token.
Token shape123456789:AAFxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - 3
Connect it in WhisperChat
In your dashboard, open the chatbot, go to Deploy and press Connect on the Telegram card. Paste the token, optionally adjust the welcome message and the group command, then press Connect Telegram.
- 4
That's it the webhook is already registered
WhisperChat validates the token against Telegram's API and calls setWebhook for you, with a secret only your chatbot knows. There is no URL to paste anywhere and no bot process to keep running.
If your WhisperChat deployment is not reachable over HTTPS, Telegram refuses the webhook and the connect step reports exactly why.
- 5
Press Start and ask something
Use “Open bot in Telegram” in the dialog, press Start to see your welcome message, then just type a question. In a one-to-one chat every message is answered.
- 6
Optional: add it to a group
Add the bot to a group like any member. There it stays quiet unless someone addresses it with /ask your question, or by mentioning @yourbot so it never talks over the conversation.
What your users get
A connected Telegram bot behaves like every other WhisperChat surface — same answers, same history, same limits.
One knowledge base
Telegram answers run through the same retrieval pipeline as your website widget. Train once; every channel stays in sync.
Threaded per chat
Each Telegram chat gets its own conversation, so follow-up questions keep their context exactly like a browser conversation does.
Cited sources
When the answer came from crawled pages, up to three source links are appended to the reply.
Visible in your dashboard
Every question is logged as chat history with Telegram as its source, so History, Insights and Leads include Telegram traffic.
Quiet in groups
In a group the bot only answers its command or a direct mention. In one-to-one chats it answers everything.
Your own welcome message
Set what people see the moment they press Start, so the bot introduces itself in your words.
Try asking: “What is your refund policy?”. The bot shows typing… for a moment, then replies with the answer and the pages it came from.
How it works
Useful if you are reviewing the integration before enabling it, or working out why something behaved the way it did.
Every update is authenticated
- The webhook URL carries a per-chatbot secret, and the same secret is registered as Telegram's secret_token so it also arrives in a request header.
- An update that proves neither is rejected before anything is read from it.
The answer is produced off the request
- Telegram re-delivers an update until the webhook answers 200, and retrieval plus generation take longer than it is willing to wait.
- WhisperChat acknowledges immediately, shows the “typing…” indicator, and sends the reply from a background worker as a normal message.
A retry never answers twice
- Each Telegram update ID is claimed in an idempotency log before the worker starts.
- A redelivery is acknowledged but never generates or bills for a second answer.
Long answers arrive in several messages
- Telegram caps a message at 4,096 characters. Longer answers are split on line breaks and sent as consecutive messages, so nothing is ever truncated.
- Formatting is sent as Markdown, and retried as plain text if Telegram rejects it the answer always gets through.
Messages and billing
- Each answered question costs one message from your plan, exactly like a widget conversation, with the same multiplier for premium models.
- When your subscription credits run out, a small daily grace allowance applies before the bot starts declining questions.
- A user's Telegram name is stored as the conversation's display name only. It is an identity, not contact details someone submitted, so it does not turn the conversation into a lead.
Credentials and privacy
One secret is involved your bot token. Here is how it is handled, and what the bot can and cannot see.
What we store, and what you control
- Your bot token is stored server-side and is never sent back to the browser the dialog shows a masked placeholder instead, and leaving the field empty keeps the saved credentials.
- Only messages sent to the bot reach WhisperChat. In groups, Telegram's own privacy mode means it does not receive ordinary chatter at all.
- Disconnecting removes the webhook from Telegram and clears the stored token. The bot still exists in your Telegram account until you delete it with @BotFather, but it stops answering.