I got a request to go over the setup of a Telegram agent for Huginn. I personally don’t use Telegram at the moment, but I managed to get a basic bot set up.

Create your Telegram bot⌗

First you will need to create a bot by messaging the BotFather and requesting a new bot.

This can be done by typing /newbot and then filling out the prompts for a username and bot name.

Once this is completed, BotFather will give you an HTTP API token. We will need this value.

Click the link to start messaging your bot. Send a message, this will come in handy later.

Setting up the Telegram Agent⌗

In Huginn, we will create a new Telegram Agent.

The fields are pretty self explanatory.

• Paste your auth token from BotFather into the Auth token field
• To get your chat_id, visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<API TOKEN>/getUpdates, replacing <API TOKEN> with your actual token. Then the id field under chat will have the chat_id.
• Change other options to preference

I think parsing into markdown is great, since I am familiar with it already.

Sending Data⌗

The Telegram agent expects events with one of the following tags: text, photo, audio, document or video.

Most likely you will need to use an EventFormattingAgent to put your desired messages into this format.

To test it out, I created a simple ManualEventAgent and pointed it at the Telegram agent.

I fired off an event that was simply

{
  "text": "Hello World"
}

and promptly received the text “Hello World” from my bot.

With the use of the EventFormattingAgent and a bit of imagination, you can format pretty much any incoming event to a telegram message