Telegram auto-reply without Premium: how to connect a bot to your own account

There are two ways to auto-reply on Telegram. The first is the built-in away message: Telegram sends the same text to everyone who writes while you’re away. The second is a bot connected to your account, which reads the question and answers what was actually asked. Until May 2026 both required Telegram Premium. Now a Telegram business bot connects without a subscription, while the away message is still a Premium feature.

Connecting a bot takes a few screens in Settings. Deciding which chats to trust it with, and what it will say there, takes longer.

What changed on 7 May 2026

Telegram launched its business features on 31 March 2024: opening hours, location, quick replies, greeting and away messages, and chatbot connections. All of it was available only to Premium subscribers, under Settings > Telegram Business (Telegram blog).

On 7 May 2026 Telegram shipped a large update about AI bots. One item in it: “every Telegram user can connect a bot to their profile” and let it reply on their behalf (announcement). The path given there is Settings > Chat Automation.

The developer documentation says it plainly: connecting a business bot does not require Telegram Premium (core.telegram.org). The Bot API changelog lists the same change in version 10.0 of 8 May 2026 (Bot API changelog).

Only the bot connection was opened up to non-Premium users: away messages, greetings and quick replies are still part of the subscription (documentation).

So guides written before May 2026 are out of date on this point: “you need Premium for an auto-reply” no longer holds for a bot.

Two kinds of Telegram auto-reply: away message and bot

Away message. It sends one text to everyone who writes during the hours you set, and doesn’t answer the question itself. How to set it up, how the business features relate to Premium, and ready-made texts are in our article on Telegram for business.

Bot. It receives the message, works out what is being asked and answers: price, availability, address, booking. If the answer isn’t in the data you gave it, a good bot passes the question to you. You either use a ready-made bot or have one built: Telegram only provides the connection, and the bot answers the way its developer set it up.

A “thanks, we’ll get back to you soon” template is useful, but it doesn’t hold on to a lead by itself. In the study we covered in How long a lead lives, a fast reply lost its advantage when the recipient believed it came from an automated system or AI (we know the paper from the university’s press release). A bot is automated too. Its value lies elsewhere: the customer gets a real answer straight away (price, stock, a time slot), and anything unusual goes to a person quickly.

So a bot makes sense if your chats show customers asking about price, stock and free time slots: one template isn’t enough there. You need a bot that answers from your price list and hands anything unusual to a person. How we build such bots is described on the business chatbots page.

How to connect a bot to your account

1. Update Telegram. The option arrived with the 7 May 2026 update. Before that, bots were connected under Telegram Business, which stayed locked without Premium.
2. Open Settings > Chat Automation. That is the path named in Telegram’s announcement. On iPhone, Android and desktop, menu items are sometimes named and placed differently.
3. Pick the bot. Enter its @username or link. You get the bot from the service you use or from your developer.
4. Choose the chats. There are two modes: “All private chats except…” and “Only selected chats”. Inside them are categories: existing chats, new chats, contacts, non-contacts, plus individual exceptions. Telegram itself gives the typical choices: exclude all chats with your contacts, or reply only in new chats. A sensible start is new chats only, so the bot doesn’t strike up a conversation with your family or with people you’ve already been talking to. The non-contacts category is wider than it looks: it also covers old conversations with people who aren’t in your contacts.
5. Grant permissions. The key one is “Reply to Messages”. The other groups are profile (name, bio, photo, username), gifts and Stars, and stories. You don’t need them for answering customers. Telegram itself warns that a bot with these rights can hand your gifts, Stars and usernames to other people.
6. Test from another account. Ask someone you’ve never chatted with to message you. If the bot is set to new chats only, it won’t answer a colleague you’ve been messaging for years. In chats the bot manages you’ll see a bar at the top saying the bot manages this chat. From there you can stop the bot in that chat or remove it from the chat entirely.

“This bot doesn’t support Telegram Business”: where the error comes from

When you connect a bot, Telegram may reply: “This bot doesn’t support Telegram Business yet.” The string has since been changed to “This bot doesn’t support Secretary Mode yet.” Both versions are visible on Telegram’s official translation platform: the old one in the edit history, the new one as current.

Premium has nothing to do with it. The error means the developer hasn’t enabled the required mode for the bot. Only bots with this mode can be connected to an account; otherwise Telegram’s server returns a BOT_BUSINESS_MISSING error (documentation).

What to do:

• It’s your bot. Turn the mode on in @BotFather. It is currently called Secretary Mode (Telegram’s guide for developers). Older guides and parts of the documentation call the same thing business mode.
• It’s someone else’s bot. You can’t switch the mode on yourself. Write to the developer or choose another bot.

Which bots support Telegram Business? Any bot whose developer enabled this mode. We did not find an official catalogue of such bots from Telegram. The simplest way to check a particular bot is to try connecting it: the error above means “no”.

Limits worth knowing in advance

• One bot per account. You can’t connect a second one, say one for sales and another for bookings (documentation).
• Private chats only. The bot doesn’t reply on your behalf in groups: both the Bot API permissions and Telegram’s terms speak only of private chats.
• The 24-hour rule. The reply permission works in private chats that had an incoming message in the last 24 hours (BusinessBotRights). A customer who went quiet three days ago won’t get the first message from the bot. If someone promises you broadcasts to old conversations through a bot on your account, ask how that squares with this rule.
• The customer doesn’t know a bot answered. Telegram’s interface has a line for the account owner: “Only you can see that this message is sent by a bot” (interface string). To the customer it is your message.
• The bot sees everything in the chats you allowed. Both the customer’s messages and your own replies. That way it can notice that you’ve stepped in and go quiet. It’s good if it does.

The main risk: answers in your name

The bot writes from your account, and the customer reads its answers as yours.

Courts and tribunals have already looked at a similar question with website bots. In the Air Canada case, a British Columbia tribunal ruled that the company is responsible for all information on its website, whether it comes from a chatbot or a static page. We cover that case and a German ruling on a clinic’s bot in our article on liability for chatbots. A bot on your personal account is an even more direct case: it doesn’t even have a separate window labelled “assistant”.

The second risk is a combination of three things. The bot sees your conversations with customers, reads text from anyone who writes to you and can send messages in your name. That is the “lethal trifecta” under which an AI agent can be talked into doing something you never wanted (breakdown with examples). What protects you is limits in code around the model, not a polite request in the prompt.

The third risk is more permissions than needed. A bot given gifts, Stars and your username can dispose of them if it errs or gets hacked. Answering customers only needs the reply permission.

Telegram also has its own requirements for business bot developers (section 5.4 of the terms). Describe truthfully what the bot does. State what data it keeps, for how long and why. Don’t use the conversations for anything else, and don’t pass them to third parties, including third-party APIs, without the user’s authorisation. If the bot answers with an external AI model, the customer’s text goes to that model’s provider, and you should know that up front.

Six questions for your bot provider

1. Which chats and permissions does the bot need, and why each one? Answering customers needs the reply permission. If they ask for profile, gifts or Stars, have them explain why.
2. Where are conversations stored, for how long and who can see them? Does customer text go to a third-party AI service, and which one?
3. What does the bot do when you write to a customer yourself? It should go quiet in that chat. For how long? Ask for a number.
4. What does the bot do with a question it has no answer to? How do you find out, and how many minutes later?
5. Where is the log? Can you see what the bot sent each customer and stop it in a single chat within seconds?
6. Does the bot tell customers it’s an AI? And what does it say when asked “are you a bot?”

If the answer to any of these is “the model is smart, it’ll figure it out”, treat it as a “no”. A full requirements template is in our article on writing a chatbot spec.

For developers: what to check

• Secretary Mode is on in @BotFather, and getMe returns can_connect_to_business: true (Bot API).
• The bot handles business_connection updates (connected, changed, disconnected), plus business_message, edited_business_message and deleted_business_messages. If you set allowed_updates explicitly, list these types in it.
• Before replying, the bot checks rights.can_reply in the latest BusinessConnection and sends the message with business_connection_id.
• Changing the connection settings may change the connection ID. The old one then returns BUSINESS_CONNECTION_INVALID, and the new one arrives in a business_connection update (documentation).
• Inline keyboards are supported in messages sent on behalf of a business account: URL buttons since Bot API 7.3 of 6 May 2024, callback buttons and their callback queries since Bot API 7.5 of 18 June 2024.
• The Bot API has been updated seven times in 2026 so far; the latest version as of 28 September is 10.3 of 24 August (changelog). Mode and field names change, so check the documentation rather than articles, this one included.

Where we stand, honestly

Our auto-responder Valli works through exactly this kind of connection: the owner connects the bot to their account, and Valli answers customers in private chats on their behalf. Our website describes Valli as a bot in pilot, and that’s accurate: we have no customer numbers yet. It replies in Russian, Uzbek and English; it understands Tajik but answers Tajik messages in Uzbek. Our instructions tell Valli to introduce itself as the owner’s AI assistant in its first message and to say yes if asked “are you a bot?”. If the owner writes to a customer personally, Valli stays silent in that chat for two hours. WhatsApp and Instagram are not connected yet.

The 24-hour rule applies to us too. Valli has broadcasts to customer segments and a “warm-up” skill that writes to customers who went quiet one to three days ago. Both go through the same connection, and according to Telegram’s documentation such a message may not reach a customer who has been silent for more than a day. In the broadcast report that customer will show up as not delivered.

We haven’t yet tested Valli on an account without Premium: until May the connection required a subscription. That’s why the Valli website and our service pages still say Premium is required. Until we’ve checked it by hand, we won’t promise otherwise. Nor have we checked whether Chat Automation is available in every country. Telegram’s announcement mentions no country restrictions.

How a Telegram bot fits into sales, with substantive answers, qualification and hand-off to a manager, is shown on the AI sales automation page.

If you want to know which customer questions you could hand to a bot, describe your process in the form on the home page or message us on Telegram. We review one process within 48 hours, free of charge.