OpenClaw on Telegram: Your Self-Hosted AI Assistant in a Chat
Telegram is one of the most popular ways to talk to OpenClaw. Connect your self-hosted, model-agnostic AI assistant to a Telegram bot and you can chat with a private AI from your phone or desktop — no separate app, no data handed to a third-party chatbot service.
Why run your AI assistant on Telegram?
- Always in your pocket. Message your assistant like any other Telegram contact.
- Private by design. Messages go to your own OpenClaw instance, not a shared bot cloud.
- Model-agnostic. Power the bot with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or a local LLM.
- Automation-ready. Trigger workflows, ask questions, and run tasks from a single chat.
How to connect OpenClaw to Telegram
- Create a bot. In Telegram, message
@BotFather, run/newbot, and copy the bot token it gives you. - Deploy OpenClaw. If you have not already, deploy your OpenClaw instance on Flux in under 30 seconds.
- Paste the token. In your OpenClaw dashboard, add the Telegram integration and paste the bot token.
- Start chatting. Open the chat with your bot and send a message — your assistant replies straight away.
Privacy notes
Because OpenClaw is self-hosted, you decide where the intelligence runs. Use a hosted model for maximum capability, or a local LLM via Ollama so that message content never leaves your instance. Either way, there is no third-party bot vendor sitting between you and your assistant.
Get started
Telegram is just one of 20+ integrations. Explore WhatsApp and Discord too, or read the full self-host OpenClaw guide. Ready now? Deploy from the homepage.