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Telegram

Connect a Telegram bot to your Workspace to message people and groups, add buttons they can tap, send and receive files, and react the moment someone writes to the bot. You create the bot yourself in Telegram, so it carries your name and picture.

What Luo can do

  • Receive messages — Luo is notified of every message the bot receives in private chats, groups, and channels, of edits, and of button taps. Your workspace can store them, route them by command or keyword, or start a task automatically.
  • Send messages — send text with formatting (bold, italic, links, code), quote a message, post into a topic of a forum group, or send silently
  • Buttons — add buttons under a message. A tap comes back to Luo, which can record the choice and update the message so it can’t be tapped twice. Buttons can also open a link.
  • Edit and delete — change the text or buttons of a message the bot sent, or delete a message
  • Files — send photos, documents, video, audio, and voice notes from a public link or straight from your workspace, and download the files people send the bot
  • Reactions and typing — react to a message with an emoji, and show “typing…” while a reply is being prepared
  • Chats and members — look up a chat, count its members, check whether someone is still a member, and list its admins
  • Know when the bot is added or removed — Luo is told when the bot joins or leaves a group, or when someone blocks it

Luo asks for your confirmation before it sends, edits, or deletes a message. You can choose to always allow it for a chat — that covers only that chat. Reactions, typing, and answering button taps don’t ask for confirmation.

What Luo can’t do

  • Message someone first. A bot can only message people who have started a chat with it (pressed Start or sent it a message), and groups or channels it was added to.
  • Read past conversations or list chats. Telegram gives bots no history and no list of their chats. Luo only sees messages that arrive after you connect, so a workspace that shows conversations stores each message as it comes in.
  • See every message in a group by default. See Groups and privacy mode.
  • Download files over 20 MB. Telegram limits bot downloads to 20 MB. Luo can send photos up to 10 MB and other files up to 50 MB.

Your bot is public

Anyone on Telegram can find your bot by its username and send it a message, and every message reaches your workspace. That’s what you want for a public support or sign-up bot. For a bot meant only for your team or a few customers, decide who it serves:

  • Tell the assistant who the bot is for when you build the workflow, for example “only respond to me and Anna” or “only in our ops group”. The assistant then builds the workflow to ignore everyone else. To find someone’s Telegram ID, have them send the bot a message and ask the assistant who wrote it.
  • Don’t let the bot share internal data with people you don’t know. Treat what strangers write as untrusted: a public bot should answer from information you’re happy to make public.
  • Stop others adding the bot to groups — in @BotFather, send /setjoingroups and choose Disable once the bot is in the groups you need.
  • Keep the token secret. Anyone with the bot token controls the bot. If it leaks, send /revoke to @BotFather and reconnect with the new token.

Before you start

You’ll need the Telegram app and a few minutes to create a bot with @BotFather, Telegram’s official bot for making bots. Telegram bots are free.

Use a bot made for Luo. Connecting a bot replaces where it delivers its messages, so a bot already used by another service or tool stops receiving messages there.

How to connect

1. Create a bot in Telegram

  1. In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather and send /newbot.
  2. Choose a name (shown in chats, e.g. Acme Support) and a username ending in bot (e.g. acme_support_bot).
  3. BotFather replies with a token that looks like 123456789:AAH…. Copy it.

2. Connect Telegram in Luo

  1. Open your workspace in Luo, go to Settings → Integrations, and click Add Integration.
  2. Select Telegram. It connects as a workspace integration, shared across members.
  3. Paste the Bot token from step 1.
  4. Click Create Integration. Luo checks the token with Telegram and shows the connection as your bot’s name and username.

Messages start reaching your workspace once it has a workflow that reacts to Telegram — ask the assistant to build one.

Groups and privacy mode

A bot added to a group sees only commands (like /help), messages that @mention it, and replies to its own messages. To let it read every message in a group, send /setprivacy to @BotFather, choose your bot, and select Disable — then remove the bot from the group and add it again. Making the bot an admin of the group also lets it see every message.

To post in a channel, the bot must be an admin of the channel.

Good to know

  • One workspace per bot. A bot delivers its messages to one place. If you connect the same bot in a second workspace and build a Telegram workflow there, messages go to the second workspace and the first one stops receiving them. Use a separate bot per workspace.
  • Sending limits. Telegram allows about one message per second in a chat and 20 per minute in a group. Luo retries short pauses automatically; spread a broadcast to many chats over time.
  • Formatting. Luo uses Telegram’s HTML formatting for bold, italic, links, and code.

Troubleshooting

  • “Telegram rejected this bot token” — copy the token again from @BotFather (/token). Revoking a token makes the old one stop working.
  • The bot can’t message someone — they haven’t started a chat with the bot yet. Ask them to open the bot and press Start.
  • The bot doesn’t react to messages in a group — privacy mode is on. See Groups and privacy mode.
  • Messages stopped arriving — ask the assistant to check the bot’s webhook status. If the bot’s messages now go somewhere else (another workspace, or another service you connected the bot to), remove the Telegram workflow, rebuild, then add it again and rebuild.
  • “The group was upgraded to a supergroup” — Telegram gave the group a new ID. The error names it; ask the assistant to use the new ID from now on.

Privacy and data handling

Luo stores your bot token encrypted and uses it only to talk to Telegram as your bot. Data flowing through Luo is governed by Luo’s security and privacy practices.

To revoke access, send /revoke to @BotFather for your bot — Luo can no longer send or receive as the bot. Then remove the integration in Luo.