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telsi

Connect your bot

Create a Telegram bot with BotFather and connect it to your Telsi instance.

Your Telsi assistant speaks to you through a Telegram bot that you create and own. This page walks through the whole process — it takes about two minutes and you only do it once.

Why your own bot?

Because you create the bot through Telegram's official tooling, the bot identity is yours: the name, the username, the profile picture. Telsi runs the brain behind it on your dedicated instance, but the bot identity stays with your Telegram account.

Step 1 — Open BotFather

@BotFather is Telegram's official bot for creating bots. Open it in any Telegram client and press Start.

Step 2 — Create the bot

Send the command:

/newbot

BotFather asks two questions:

  1. A name — what people see in chats, e.g. My Assistant. You can change this later.
  2. A username — must be unique and end in bot, e.g. my_telsi_bot. This one is permanent, so pick something you like.

Step 3 — Copy the token

When the bot is created, BotFather replies with an HTTP API token that looks like this:

1234567890:AAExampleExampleExampleExampleExample

Treat this like a password — anyone who has it can control your bot. Don't post it anywhere public.

Step 4 — Paste it into the dashboard

Go to your Telsi dashboard. If your instance is provisioned but no bot is connected yet, the setup form is front and center. Paste the token and submit.

Behind the scenes, Telsi:

  1. Encrypts the token (AES-256) before storing it
  2. Injects it into your dedicated instance
  3. Your assistant starts listening for messages on your bot

Within a few seconds, your bot is live.

Step 5 — Say hello

Open your bot in Telegram (search for the username you picked) and send any message. You should get a reply from your assistant. That's it — you're connected.

The menu button and the Mini App

Once connected, your bot's menu button opens the Telsi Mini App — a console inside Telegram where you can chat with your assistant and browse its knowledge, memory, and scheduled tasks. See The Mini App for what's inside.

Troubleshooting

  • Bot doesn't reply — double-check you pasted the full token, with the colon, and no trailing spaces. You can re-paste a corrected token in the dashboard at any time.
  • Pasted the wrong token / revoked it — generate a fresh one with BotFather's /token command and paste the new value in the dashboard.
  • Want a different name or photo — use BotFather's /setname and /setuserpic; no Telsi changes needed.