How to Auto-Reply to Telegram Messages With AI From Your Own Account (2026)

For a lot of sellers, course creators, coaches, repair shops, agencies and service businesses, the support channel is not a website and not a bot. It is the owner's Telegram. A customer sees a post, taps the username and writes: how much is it, is it in stock, when can you deliver, do you have a slot on Friday. The owner answers between other work, late at night, or not at all.

A separate bot does not fix that. Customers already have your username, and they are not going to look for @YourShopBot. What fixes it is an assistant that answers inside the chats customers already open with you. That is exactly what Telegram's Chat Automation allows, and since 2026 it is open to everyone.

Telegram Business introduced chatbots for personal accounts in 2024: you could connect a bot that reads and answers your private chats. It was limited to Premium subscribers. In May 2026 Telegram opened it to every user. You go to Settings > Chat Automation, add a bot and choose which chats it may access. On the bot's side the same feature is called Secretary Mode.

Three rules come from Telegram itself, and they are good ones:

• You choose the chats. Common setups are "all chats except my contacts" or "only new chats".
• You choose the rights. The bot can read the chats you picked; it can reply only if you allow it.
• It answers, it does not start. A bot may write in a chat only within 24 hours of the customer's last message. It replies to questions; it never cold-messages anyone.

Telegram's business tools also include greeting and away messages. They are useful, and they are fixed text: the same sentence for every customer, whatever they asked. "Thanks for your message, I'll reply soon" tells a customer nothing about the price they wanted.

An AI auto-reply reads the question and answers it from your own content: prices, stock, delivery times, opening hours, booking rules, course details, in the language the customer wrote in. Use a fixed away message when all you need to say is "back tomorrow". Use AI when the questions repeat and the answers already exist somewhere in your website, price list or FAQ.

• A Telegram account. No Premium subscription needed.
• A bot connected to an AI platform. In Chatloom you can create one in a tap from Channels, Telegram, Create my bot in Telegram, or connect a bot you already have.
• Your content. A website, a price list, an FAQ, PDFs. The AI answers from this, and it is the difference between a useful reply and an invented one. If your answers live in your head, write the twenty most common ones down first; it is the best hour you will spend on this.

1. Create or connect the bot. In Chatloom open Channels, choose Telegram and press Create my bot in Telegram. Press Start in the chat that opens, then Create my bot, and confirm in Telegram's creation window. If you already have a bot, paste its token instead.
2. Turn on Secretary Mode. Open @BotFather, tap Open to launch its app, choose your bot, and under Mode Settings switch on Secretary Mode. Telegram can take a few minutes to report the change; the panel in Chatloom checks it for you.
3. Connect it to your account. In the Telegram app open Settings > Chat Automation, add your bot, choose which chats it may answer and allow it to reply.
4. Approve it in Chatloom. Your account appears on the Telegram card a few seconds later. Press Approve. Until you do, nothing is answered and nothing is stored, because anyone who knows a bot's username could otherwise connect it to their own account and run their chats through yours.

Now test it the way a customer would: write to your own account from a second account, or ask a friend to. The reply arrives in seconds, from your account.

• It steps back when you reply. If you answer a customer yourself from your phone, the AI stays quiet with that customer for a window you choose, from 30 minutes to 24 hours. Nobody gets two answers to one question, and you can take over any conversation simply by typing.
• It says it is an AI. The first AI reply in each chat starts with a short line saying it was written by an AI. A reply from a person's account looks like that person typed it, so telling customers is the honest thing to do, and in the EU the AI Act requires it.
• Everything lands in one inbox. Customer messages, AI replies and the replies you type in Telegram show up in Chatloom's inbox as one thread, with a countdown for Telegram's 24-hour window.
• It hands over. When a customer asks for a person, the AI says so and flags the chat for you instead of improvising.

It is good at the repetitive questions that eat your evenings: prices, stock, delivery, opening hours, booking rules, course details, payment methods. It answers them in whatever language the customer writes, at 3 a.m. as well as at noon, and it answers from your content, so the answers match what you would have said.

It is not built for negotiating, for complaints that need judgment, or for anything you have not written down. Keep your content current: if your price changes and your price list does not, the bot will quote the old price. And it does not message people first. Telegram's 24-hour rule and our own design keep it to answering.

The AI sees only the chats you selected in Chat Automation, and only after you approve the account. Each message is sent to the AI provider your agent uses to write the answer, through business APIs that do not train on it. Conversations are kept like every other conversation in your Chatloom account, 30 days after the last message by default, and you can delete them at any time. You can disconnect whenever you like, in Telegram under Chat Automation or in Chatloom with one click. The details are in our privacy policy.

Telegram charges nothing for bots or for Chat Automation. In Chatloom, Telegram is included on every plan, the Free plan too. Plans differ by how many AI replies they include each month, and one customer question plus the AI's answer counts as one. The Free plan includes 100, enough to run it on real chats for a while before deciding; paid plans start when the volume is real.