Telegram Chat Automation: How to Connect a Bot to Your Profile, and Where It Stops

Since May, the settings screen in your Telegram app has had a row it never had before: Chat Automation. You may already have pointed a bot at it so that someone, or something, answers the messages that arrive while you sleep. Telegram announced the feature for every user in its May 7, 2026 update, and the Bot API 10.0 changelog of May 8 removed the old Premium requirement: secretary bots can now manage the accounts of users without a Premium subscription.

The headline is accurate. A bot can now reply from your profile. The fine print lives in the Bot API, and it is narrower than most write-ups suggest: a connected bot can reply only in private chats that received an incoming message in the last 24 hours. That single rule decides what Chat Automation is good for, so this guide covers the setup, the rights, the limits, and the point where a profile bot stops being the right tool.

Until this year, automating Telegram meant a separate bot account. It had its own name and its own chat, and a customer had to find it and press Start before anything happened. Chat Automation reverses the direction. You keep talking from your own account, and a bot you authorize processes the incoming messages and, where you allow it, replies on your behalf.

The machinery is not new. It is the same "chatbots for business" connection Telegram shipped with Telegram Business in March 2024, where business users could connect bots that "process and answer messages on their behalf". In 2024 that option sat under Settings, then Telegram Business. What changed in 2026 is who gets it: the setting moved into every profile, and the Premium requirement went away.

The same release added three other bot features, and they get mixed up in coverage. Only one of them speaks as you.

The guest bot details come from Telegram's developer documentation: a guest bot has no access to the chat history or the member list, and hears nothing further unless someone mentions it or replies to it again. If you are choosing bots for groups and channels rather than for your own inbox, our guide to the best Telegram bots in 2026 sorts them by job.

The user side takes a few minutes. The part that needs thought is step 3.

1. Pick a bot that supports it. Not every bot can be connected. The developer has to enable Secretary Mode for the bot in @BotFather first. If a bot you want is not accepted, that is the usual reason.
2. Open Settings, then Chat Automation. This is the path Telegram gives in its announcement.
3. Choose which chats the bot can access. Telegram's own examples are excluding all chats with your contacts, or letting the bot respond only to new chats. Start narrow. "New chats only" is a sensible first setting for an auto-responder, because it keeps the bot away from people who already know you.
4. Check what the connection allows. The connection carries a set of rights, covered in the next section. Anything beyond replying should have a reason.
5. Look at a managed chat. Each chat the bot manages shows a quick action bar at the top, and tapping "Manage Bot" opens the bot itself, according to the business bots documentation. That bar is how you tell, at a glance, which conversations are on autopilot.

If you are building the bot, the developer flow is short:

1. In @BotFather, enable Secretary Mode for the bot.
2. Handle business_connection updates (connection established, edited, ended).
3. Handle business_message, edited_business_message and deleted_business_messages.
4. Read the rights field of the latest BusinessConnection before acting.
5. Pass business_connection_id to sendMessage, sendChatAction and other send methods.

Two details catch developers out. First, custom reply keyboards are not supported for messages sent on behalf of a business account, per the Bot API reference, so a button-menu flow built for a normal bot chat will not carry over as-is. Second, Telegram's Bot Developer Terms, section 5.4, says business message data may be used only to provide the chatbot service, may not be shared with third parties (including third-party APIs) without the user's authorization, and that the bot must not hide its activity from the account owner. If your bot forwards message text to an outside AI model, read that section before you ship.

Every connection carries a BusinessBotRights object. The full list in the Bot API is longer than most people expect, because the same connection can manage a profile, not just its chats.

The recommendations in the last column are ours, not Telegram's. A bot holding can_delete_all_messages can remove any private message in the chats it manages, including the ones you wrote. For a responder that only needs to answer, that right is pure downside. Treat each right the way you would treat admin rights in a group: granted one at a time, for a stated reason.

The limits are not hidden, but they are spread across three documents. Put together, they look like this.

• It cannot start a conversation. can_reply covers private chats with an incoming message in the last 24 hours. A lead who went quiet on Tuesday is out of the bot's reach by Thursday. No cold outreach, no "just following up" after a day of silence, no message to someone who has never written to you.
• It does not work in groups. The Developer Terms describe the feature as helping manage and reply to incoming messages "in private chats" the user selects. The group route is guest mode, and a guest bot answers as itself, not as you.
• It does not read your history. The bot receives new messages as updates. The Bot API has no method for reading back through a chat, so the bot knows a conversation from the moment it was connected, and only what it chose to store. Ask it what a client said in March and it has nothing.
• One connection covers one profile. A BusinessConnection belongs to the single user who created it. The same bot can be connected by many people, but each of them sets it up on their own profile, and nothing in the feature gives a team one view across those profiles or says who owns which chat.
• It is visible to you, by design. The quick action bar and section 5.4 both make the bot's activity visible to the account owner. Outgoing messages it sends carry a sender_business_bot field in the API identifying the bot. Telegram's documentation does not say whether the other person sees any marker, so write the bot's messages as if they might.

None of these are bugs. They are the boundary Telegram drew so that a third-party bot can sit inside a personal account without becoming a spam engine. They are also why the feature fits one kind of user far better than another.

For a solo operator, Chat Automation is the best thing Telegram has shipped for inbound messages in years. A freelancer, a creator or a founder who answers their own DMs can now have a bot reply after hours, answer the same pricing question for the fortieth time, or take a booking, all from their real profile and without asking anyone to open a bot. Telegram Business already offered fixed greeting and away messages. A connected bot can write an actual answer.

It stops working at the second person or the second account, whichever comes first.

Take a BD lead running eight personal accounts. To use Chat Automation everywhere, they connect a bot to each profile separately. They still have eight inboxes, eight sets of rights to audit, and no shared view. Every deal that goes quiet for a day drops out of the bot's 24-hour window. Every follow-up, which in BD is most of the job, still happens by hand. Now add a colleague who covers the accounts on weekends, and there is no place in the feature that records who answered whom.

That is not a bot problem. It is an operations problem, and it is the one a Telegram CRM built on personal accounts is designed for. Entergram connects real personal Telegram accounts, not bots, each routed through its own unique proxy. You manage 100+ accounts in one inbox and filter by account instead of switching between them. Each account is either shared with the workspace, which suits a support team answering from one number, or kept private to the salesperson who owns it. Pipeline stages, custom fields and chat context sit on top, which our Telegram Sales CRM page covers in detail.

Read the Entergram column with its limits attached. It is not an auto-responder and does not build chatbot flows. Starting conversations from a personal account is still subject to Telegram's spam rules, so Entergram paces broadcasts and spreads them across accounts rather than ignoring that risk. And if all you need is one profile answering inbound questions at night, a connected bot is simpler than any CRM.

Our position on AI for Telegram has been that the useful version is not a bot waiting on a webhook. It is an assistant that reads the conversations that already happened, across every account you run, and acts in them. Chat Automation narrows that gap more than anything Telegram has shipped. The bot now writes from your profile, in your chats, to people who never opened a bot. That is a real change, and it deserves to be said plainly.

It is still a webhook, though. It hears new messages, in private chats you selected, on one profile, and its ability to reply expires 24 hours after the other person's last message. It cannot tell you which of your eight accounts last spoke to a prospect, because it has never seen the other seven.

The Entergram MCP works from the other direction. It connects an AI client such as Claude or ChatGPT to every Telegram account on your seat at once. Through it, the assistant can auto-fill CRM fields from what was said in a chat, open and triage tickets, read a chat to detect its language before localizing a newsletter, and find and manage leads. It also exposes the raw message events (account, chat, timestamp, direction) across every account, so the assistant can work out response times or busiest hours itself instead of reading a fixed report. An MCP that covers one bot is a demo. An MCP that covers every personal account on your seat is infrastructure, and we know of no other product that does the second.

The limits are what make that believable, so here they are. The MCP is rate limited to protect the connected accounts. Its live Telegram search matches names and usernames, not message content. It does not get an account into private groups that account was never admitted to. And it acts when your AI client acts, which means it is not a round-the-clock responder in the way a secretary bot is. For the longer comparison of the two approaches, read Telegram AI bot vs AI on your personal account.

1. Write down the job before picking the bot. "Answer pricing questions from new chats after 7 pm" is a job. "Handle my DMs" is not.
2. Start with new chats only. Widen the scope after a week of reading what the bot actually sent.
3. Grant can_reply and can_delete_sent_messages, and stop there. Add others only when the job requires them.
4. Never let two responders share a chat. If a person, a second bot, or a team tool also answers on that profile, decide who goes first. Two replies to one question is worse than a slow one.
5. Ask the developer where messages go. Section 5.4 forbids sharing business message data with third parties without your authorization. A bot that cannot say which AI provider sees your chats has answered the question.
6. Plan the hand-off at hour 24. Anything the bot cannot close inside the window needs a person, so decide who that person is.

Yes. Bot API 10.0, released on May 8, 2026, allowed secretary bots to manage the accounts of users without a Telegram Premium subscription. Open Settings, then Chat Automation, and choose the bot and the chats it can access.

No. Its reply right covers private chats that had an incoming message in the last 24 hours. It cannot open a new conversation or follow up after a day of silence.

No. It manages private chats you select. In groups, the closest feature is guest mode, where you mention a bot by @username and it replies once, under its own name rather than yours.

The reply comes from your account, and the Bot API records which bot sent it. Telegram's documentation does not say whether the other person sees a label, so do not rely on them not knowing. You always see it, through the bar at the top of each managed chat.

Only in the sense that each salesperson can connect the same bot to their own profile. There is no shared inbox, no assignment and no view across profiles, and the 24-hour window still applies to every chat. For a team working several accounts, you need a tool that operates the accounts themselves.

Greeting and away messages are fixed texts that Telegram sends for you. Chat Automation hands incoming messages to a bot, which can compose a different answer each time, within the rights and chats you allow.

Count two things: the profiles that receive business messages, and the people who need to see those conversations. If both numbers are one, connect a bot, give it can_reply and little else, and you are done.

If either number is higher, or your deals need follow-ups after a day of silence, a profile bot will not get you there. That is the point to try a CRM that runs on the accounts themselves. Entergram has a 3-day free trial, no credit card required.