Home Assistant Telegram Integration

I know, I know… At first glance, Telegram has a bad reputation. However, the Home Assistant Telegram integration can have certain advantages over normal app notifications. In this post, I’ll show you how to integrate and configure it in Home Assistant.

To do this, install Telegram on your mobile phone and create an account. Also install the Telegram Bot integration in Home Assistant.

Create a bot

In Telegram, start a new chat with the chat bot ‘BotFather’. Alternatively, you can click on this link: https://t.me/botfather

Start the chat with /start and then create a new bot with the command /newbot.

You will now be asked for the name of the bot. Think of a name here. However, this name must not already be taken. Also, make sure that the name only contains lowercase letters and underscores. It must also end with ‘bot’. You will then receive an API key. Please keep this safe. We will need it in the next steps.

Add this bot to the chat where you want the Home Assistant notifications to arrive.

This can be a private chat or a group chat.

Get a Chat ID

Next, we need the ID of the chat. To do this, we add the bot ‘GetGroupId’ to your chat.

To obtain the chat ID, enter /getgroupid in the chat. You will receive the chat ID in response. Keep this safe as well.

Configure Home Assistant

In Home Assistant, go to the previously installed Telegram Bot Integration and click on ‘Add entry’. Select ‘Polling’ under “Platform” and enter the API you received from BotFather under ‘API Token’.

Now click on ‘Add allowed chat ID’ and enter the chat ID from GetGroupID. Please note: If the ID contains a minus sign, this must also be entered.

In order to be able to send a notification, we need to create a notifier in configuration.yaml. It looks like this, for example:

notify:
  - platform: telegram
    name: "My Telegram Chat"
    chat_id: 44441111

Replace the name and chat ID, click Save, and restart Home Assistant.

After restarting Home Assistant, you can select Telegram Chat as a notification in Automation.

Benefits

OK, fine. But what makes Telegram better than Home Assistant notifications?

Telegram has a message history. This means you can see the exact time a notification came in and read it even after you’ve swiped it away.

Telegram can automatically delete messages that are older than, for example, one week. This keeps the chat history clean.

You can attach images from, for example, a surveillance camera and zoom in on them in the chat. This is not possible with the simple notification. To do this, the following must be included in the ‘data’ section of the notification:

photo:
  - file: /storage/images/image.jpg
    caption: Camera front door

I also find the group chat function very practical. This allows several people to receive a notification when, for example, the washing machine is finished.

When changing mobile phones, the administrative effort remains minimal. Normally, every automation would have to be adjusted with the notification. Now all you have to do is install Telegram, log in, and that’s it.

However, the biggest advantage for me is that you can have the notifications read aloud in Android Auto. You don’t even have to configure anything separately for this. Telegram, like WhatsApp, is a normal chat app and offers this feature out of the box.