Telegram

DRUID authors can integrate chatbots with Telegram allowing their customers to start conversations with their chatbot in the Telegram app.

Note:  Telegram channel integration is not available in Druid on premise deployments; you cannot activate the channel.
Important!  The Welcome flow will be triggered at the user's first conversation with the bot; the predict with the initial "user says" is dropped.

To integrate the chatbot with Telegram, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new Telegram bot following Microsoft instructions.
    2. Note:  Write down or copy/paste in a document the access token generated when creating the Telegram bot.
  2. Log in the Druid Chatbot Portal and from the main menu, select your bot. The bot configuration page appears by default on the Details tab.
  3. Click the Channels tab, then click Telegram. The Telegram Channel Info section expands.

  4. Enter the access token you copied when creating the Telegram bot.
  5. Click the Publish button. The channel activation might take up to 1 minute, wait until it completes.

After the channel's activation, two fields are available in DRUID:

  • [[ChatUser]].ChannelId = "telegram"
  • [[ChatUser]].UserId stores the unique identifier of the Telegram user account.

To open the chatbot in the Telegram channel, in the Druid Portal, go to the bot settings, click the Channels tab and click on the Telegram channel icon. You can start talking to the bot.

Note:  In DRUID 7.5 and higher, when a user initiates a conversation with the bot, the Welcome flow will be automatically triggered. Regardless of the user's subscription status to the bot channel, the welcome message will be promptly sent to the user, ensuring a seamless and engaging interaction experience.

Limitations

Telegram has a limited number of characters for hero cards / choice buttons, as follows:

  • Maximum 60 characters for button Value and Title.
  • Approximately 200 characters for Subtitle.
Note:  

In UTF-8 encoding, 128 ASCII characters are encoded in 1 byte while 1920 Cyrillic characters are encoded using 2 bytes. This is why the words length between ASCII and the Cyrillic native script differs. To see the words length, you can use Notepad++.