Run via Telegram

Deploy Zeph as a Telegram bot with streaming responses, MarkdownV2 formatting, and user whitelisting.

Setup

1. Create a bot via @BotFather — send /newbot and copy the token.

2. Configure the token:

   ZEPH_TELEGRAM_TOKEN="123456:ABC-DEF1234ghIkl-zyx57W2v1u123ew11" zeph
   

   Or store in the age vault:

   zeph vault set ZEPH_TELEGRAM_TOKEN "123456:ABC..."
   zeph --vault age
   

3. Required — restrict access to specific usernames:

   [telegram]
   allowed_users = ["your_username"]
   

   The bot refuses to start without at least one allowed user. Messages from unauthorized users are silently rejected.

Bot Commands

Streaming

Telegram has API rate limits, so streaming works differently from CLI:

• First chunk sends a new message immediately
• Subsequent chunks edit the existing message in-place (throttled to one edit per 10 seconds)
• Long messages (>4096 chars) are automatically split
• MarkdownV2 formatting is applied automatically

Voice and Image Support

• Voice notes: automatically transcribed via STT when stt feature is enabled
• Photos: forwarded to the LLM for visual reasoning (requires vision-capable model)
• See Audio & Vision for backend configuration

Other Channels

Zeph also supports Discord, Slack, CLI, and TUI. See Channels for the full reference.