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Channels /Telegram

Telegram

v1.0.x · updated 2026-06-26

Telegram is AiHummer’s production-grade, recommended first channel. It is the fastest way to get a working agent in front of real people: create a bot with @BotFather, give the connector the token, and inbound messages start flowing to the gateway.

The Telegram connector is installed from the in-product Marketplace and configured in the Admin UI. It runs host-native and talks to the gateway over the inbound API, so it scales and restarts independently of the turn engine.

Why start with Telegram

Telegram has the least friction of any AiHummer channel: no carrier, no OAuth consent screen, no app review. A bot token is enough to send and receive messages, and the same connector covers both internal staff chats and customer-facing bots. Because it is production-grade and fully exercised, it is the channel we recommend you wire up first when evaluating AiHummer.

Polling or webhook

The connector supports both ingestion modes, so it works whether or not your gateway is reachable from the public internet.

  • Long polling — the connector pulls updates from Telegram. No inbound port or TLS is required, which makes it ideal for local development and private networks.
  • Webhook — Telegram pushes updates to a public HTTPS URL. Lower latency and better suited to production behind a reverse proxy that terminates TLS.

The connector listens on port 8800 in a normal deployment, or 8091 for a local run. Each inbound message is posted to the gateway URL configured in AIHUMMER_INBOUND_URL, authenticated with the shared inbound secret.

Rich messages, reactions and polls

Beyond plain text, the Telegram channel renders Rich Messages — formatted replies that map an agent’s structured output onto Telegram’s native message features. It also supports reactions and polls, so an agent can react to a user’s message or put a quick poll into a chat as part of a turn.

[!TIP] Telegram is the channel identified to AiHummer as telegram. Use that channel id when you bind an agent or filter conversations by source.

Bot-to-bot with a loop guard

Agents can talk to other bots. To make that safe, the connector ships a loop guard: it detects and breaks runaway bot-to-bot exchanges before they turn into an infinite ping-pong. This lets you compose multi-bot workflows without the classic feedback-loop failure mode.

Secret brokering over OIDC

The bot token and other connector secrets are never hard-coded into the service. Instead the connector fetches them at runtime from a Secrets Service over OIDC — it authenticates, then retrieves the credentials it needs. Secrets stay in the encrypted vault and out of config files and process arguments.

[!NOTE] Inbound messages are posted to AIHUMMER_INBOUND_URL and secured by the shared HMAC inbound secret (AIHUMMER_INBOUND_SECRET). The gateway must have a default workspace configured to dispatch them.

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