Telegram
With over 200 million active monthly users, Telegram is a free messaging app with a focus on speed and security. Thanks to its distributed infrastructure and encryption, Telegram is fast and secure. It can be used on multiple devices at the same time — messages are synced seamlessly across any number of phones, tablets or computers. Telegram allows businesses to send messages, photos, files of any type, as well as use other rich capabilities like quick replies, postbacks, compound messages and carousels.
Capabilities
Telegram supports a wide variety of capabilities as seen in the channel capabilities grid. Below is a detailed view of each capabilities.
Content Types
Action Types
Structured Messages
Indicators
Delivery Events
Delivery events allow you to track deliveries of Smooch messages to Telegram by subscribing to the message:delivery:channel webhook. Failures to deliver a message to Telegram can be detected by subscribing to the message:delivery:failure webhook.
The Telegram message IDs associated with each Smooch message are available in delivery event payloads in the externalMessages property.
Creating a Bot
To create a bot, follow the instructions here.
After choosing the bot’s username, BotFather will generate an access token for the API, which Smooch will need to integrate with Telegram.
Configuring Telegram
Once you have created the bot, all you have to do is enter the bot’s access token on the integration page. Smooch will now relay any message it receives to your business systems.
Conversations Through the Bot
To send a user to your bot, you can direct them to https://telegram.me/<your_bot_username>. Telegram users can also search for your bot by its username, which is obtained while creating a bot with BotFather. Once they have added your bot to their contacts, your bot will act as any other Telegram user. Any user will be able to send normal text messages to your bot or any of the supported file formats (documents, images, sound). If the user sends a file, the message will contain a link to the file that was sent.
When you reply from any of the configured backend channels, Telegram users will receive the message as though it was coming from the bot.
Action Buttons
When used with Telegram, message actions work as expected. A button with type link will bring the user to a web page, while postback buttons will trigger any Smooch webhook listening to the postback trigger.
Payment requests with the Stripe integration will turn into link buttons which bring the user to a checkout page where payment information can be entered.