Telegram launches major AI bot update

Telegram has unveiled a major update positioned as a revolution in AI bots.

The developers have rolled out more than ten major new features and hundreds of technical improvements, expanding capabilities across automation, content personalisation, and community management.

Guest Bots

Bots can now be summoned in any chat or group straight from the input field. Tagging a bot's username in a message gets it to process the request and reply right there in the conversation. The bot only sees the messages it was tagged in and any replies to them — it has no view of the rest of the chat or the other participants.

Bot-to-Bot Communication

Bots can now talk not just to people, but to each other. The change opens the door to autonomous AI agents working together, chaining complex workflows inside the messenger with no human in the loop.

Streaming Text for Bots

Replies from AI bots now stream onto the screen as the model generates them, instead of arriving all at once at the end. An update to the Bot API has made the process faster and added new animations, so users no longer sit watching a blank screen waiting for a reply to finish.

Chat Automation

A bot can now be connected to a personal profile and set up to reply to messages on the user's behalf. The automation settings let users decide exactly which chats it has access to, limiting it to new conversations only, for example, or to people outside their contact list.

Custom AI Styles

The built-in AI text editor now accepts custom prompts, letting users design their own writing styles. The feature is handy for teams looking to standardise the voice of their posts, or for adding a layer of in-group slang. Each style comes with a shareable link that lets others preview examples and add it to their own editor in one tap.

Smart emoji and sticker search

The sticker panel has gained an expanded search that covers more than 100 million user-created items, with keyword support in 36 languages. To index and tag that volume of images, Telegram is using custom AI models running on the Cocoon Network.

New poll settings and statistics

Channel and group admins also get new tools for working with polls. Once a poll passes 100 votes, an interactive graph becomes available to track how each option's share of the vote changes over time.

Polls also get tighter controls. Participation can now be limited to channel subscribers or restricted to users from selected countries.

Silent Scheduled Messages

The scheduled message menu has a new option to mute the delivery sound. It is useful for queueing up news posts, drops, or reminders that should land without pinging the recipient at the moment they arrive.

Moderation of reactions in groups

Group admins now get a new moderation tool, with the ability to delete reactions left under messages. They can remove a single emoji or clear all reactions from a specific user in just a couple of taps.