What a Telegram bot can actually do for a business that answers messages

A Telegram bot is a structured reply surface, not a megaphone. For a business whose work is answering messages that customers sent first, the useful parts are few and all documented: a link that opens the chat, commands somebody taps instead of typing, buttons under a message, and handling for the photos, documents and locations arriving the other way. Telegram’s introduction for developers describes bots as “small applications that run entirely within the Telegram app”, and most of what follows is that sentence taken literally.

Where the conversation starts

A bot’s public address is a link. From the Bot Features guide: “Each bot has a link that opens a conversation with it in Telegram”. What the person then sees is documented too: “Users will see a Start button the first time they open a chat with your bot.”

The customer’s tap is also what makes any of this possible, because a Telegram bot cannot start the conversation: Telegram writes that rule into its introduction for developers, and no paid tier lifts it.

That link can carry information. “Deep linking allows special links that send certain parameters to the bot when opened.” Telegram’s worked example ends in ?start=airplane, after which the bot receives /start airplane as a message, which is the whole attribution story for a business with several places to put a link. A group equivalent, startgroup, exists too, where “Following a link with this parameter prompts the user to select a group to add the bot to”.

The QR entry point is not on these pages. QR codes appear once across the four Telegram pages we read and it is about something else: Mini Apps can use Telegram’s “native dialogs for reading QR codes”. Turning a t.me link into a printed code happens outside Telegram, so we will not call a QR entry point a documented platform feature.

“A command is a simple /keyword that tells the bot what to do.” Telegram’s apps do the presentation: they highlight commands in messages, suggest a list when the user types a slash, and put a button near the input, where “By default, tapping this button opens a menu that can hold some or all of a bot’s commands, including a short description for each.”

The shape is constrained. “Commands must always start with the / symbol and contain up to 32 characters”, and the API adds that a command “Can contain only lowercase English letters, digits and underscores.” setMyCommands sets the list, where “At most 100 commands can be specified.” A list can vary by audience, since “Your bot is able to show different commands to different users and groups”, and it comes with a security note worth quoting: “Your backend should always verify that received commands are valid and that the user was authorized to use them regardless of scope.”

Two keyboards, and the difference is the whole trick

A reply keyboard replaces what the customer types. “Whenever your bot sends a message, it can display a special keyboard with predefined reply options”, and the buttons are not all text: “Simple text buttons will immediately send the respective text, while other buttons can request a user, chat, location, contact or poll, or open a Mini App.” The location and contact requests are “Available in private chats only.”

An inline keyboard does the opposite. The API describes “an inline keyboard that appears right next to the message it belongs to”, and Telegram is explicit about the consequence: “Unlike with custom reply keyboards, pressing buttons on inline keyboards doesn’t send messages to the chat”. The answer to a pressed button can be quiet too, since it “will be displayed to the user as a notification at the top of the chat screen or as an alert.”

Which one you use decides what the thread reads like afterwards: a reply keyboard leaves the customer’s choice in the transcript, an inline keyboard changes state without a trace.

Groups and private chats are two different jobs

Telegram’s introduction covers both: “Users can chat directly with bots, or add them to groups and channels to introduce extra features.” In groups, “By default, all bots added to groups run in Privacy Mode and only see relevant messages and commands”. In private chats there is no such filter, and the FAQ lists what every bot receives regardless of settings, including “All messages from private chats with users.”

Groups have a private channel inside them, since “Ephemeral messages let bots send private responses inside group chats - visible only to a specific user and the bot.” A long private thread can be filed rather than scrolled, because “Bots and users can organize long-running private conversations into separate topics”. Customers belong in the private chats; the group is your own staff room.

Files, locations and what the bot is allowed to carry

Incoming messages are not just text. “Users can send messages of all types to bots, including text, files, locations, stickers, voice messages and even dice if they’re feeling lucky.” A shared pin arrives in a field labelled “Message is a shared location, information about the location”. The sizes are published:

Method or field	What Telegram’s documentation says
`getFile`	“For the moment, bots can download files of up to 20MB in size.”
`getFile`, on the download link	“It is guaranteed that the link will be valid for at least 1 hour.”
`sendDocument`	“Bots can currently send files of any type of up to 50 MB in size, this limit may be changed in the future.”
`sendLocation`	“Use this method to send point on the map.”
`sendVenue`	“Use this method to send information about a venue.”

One line on the introduction page is a storage warning dressed as a difference between bots and users: “Bots have limited cloud storage - older messages may be removed by the server shortly after they have been processed.” A bot is not your archive. If a customer sends a photo of a damaged item, store it yourself.

What still needs a person

Telegram documents a bot working inside a business account, and it reads as a permission model, not an automation pitch. “Bots can enable Secretary Mode, allowing users to connect the bot to their account so it can process incoming messages and, where permitted, respond on their behalf.” The owner keeps the scope, since “The account owner can specify which chats your bot can access”, and the rights are itemised: “The Business Bot rights control actions such as replying (can_reply), marking messages as read (can_read_messages) and deleting messages.”

The sentence that says where the real work lives is on the features page: “The Bot API provides the messaging, multi-platform presentation, access and lifecycle features - the model, memory and bot logic are flexible and entirely up to you.” Telegram hands over a transport and an interface. What to say, whether it is safe to say it, and when a person takes over is not in the box, and that is the part that fails in public when it is wrong. Ask it of any tool writing on your behalf: what the category can and cannot do is worth reading first, and answering an unhappy customer stays a craft problem rather than a template problem.

There is no Telegram integration on this site and nothing here connects to one. The platform is just documented well enough to judge before anybody builds on it.

What we have not verified

We read documentation, not a running bot. Nothing was registered, no command was tapped, no file was downloaded and no business connection was held, so every limit above is Telegram’s published figure, not one we measured. What is checkable is the surface: a link, a command list, two kinds of button, private chats where the bot sees everything and groups where by default it does not.