WhatsApp or Telegram? What to choose for my AI chat bot?

Customer-facing conversational AI agents (chat bots) need a frontend to be embedded in, whether that is a chat box on your website or a messenger app, like WhatsApp or Telegram.

Recently, I've been working with a healthcare education company, developing an AI bot focused on consulting clients on the company's products. The company, guided by the consideration of their clients' convenience, ended up going for both Whatsapp and Telegram as the interface for this AI bot.

And oh my god, has this experience illustrated yet again the divide between Whatsapp and Telegram when it comes to setting up a bot chat on the platform. Whereas Telegram feels like taking walk in the park when it comes to setup, Whatsapp feels like doing timed burpees.

In this article, I'll briefly compare Meta's Whatsapp and Telegram as two potential choices for a messenger for your AI-enhanced bot to operate through.

Let's start with the challenges that Meta puts forth for Whatsapp, which Telegram simply does not:

• You need to verify your business with Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform before publishing your bot in Whatsapp. This process is notoriously lengthy and confusing and entails providing documents that prove your business' physical address and phone number and/or email address. Not all documents are accepted and with all the back-and-forth between Meta and yourself, the review process can take weeks. And good luck if your business' legal name does not match your operational name.

• While your service is in development or testing, with Whatsapp, you can test your service only with a select (up to 5, I believe) users, the phone numbers of which you need to pre-define in advance with Meta. Telegram, on the other hand, lets you test your bot by interacting with it from any account and from as many accounts as your heart desires.

• Even though Meta's interface is plagued with bugs that hurdle development and their API is needlessly complex, I find Facebook's developer documentation puzzlingly scarse and support nonexistent. Good luck getting help from the Facebook help center with their own bug that's precluding your development work. On the other hand, Telegram's Bot API (used for connecting your service with Telegram's internal logic) is open-source, which means developers can look through its code and debug their own code with full transparency.

• Speaking of the Telegram Bot API being open source (Meta's one is not), this affords more possibilities to developers, such as changing or extending the API's functionality, deploying the API on their own servers for tighter control or performance considerations.

• And on the topic of free software, Telegram is free money-wise as well. You don't pay when your bot messages your users, whereas Whatsapp charges you a pretty penny per conversation (fees depend on your country, type of message, etc. and have recently undergone a logic reshuffling, so check out https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/pricing/ for more information)

• You can't send newsletters / mass messages on Whatsapp without Facebook's prior approval. You have to submit the content of the message you desire to send to your users as a so-called "message template" and wait for Meta's green light before sending it off to your audience. As you might have guessed, Telegram doesn't have this pre-approval process.

  
  

Here's a caveat though. Because Telegram is more relaxed with its business approval and mass message pre-approval policies, it safeguards its users in a different way: Telegram bots can't message humans first. On Telegram, it is the human user that has to initiate a conversation with the bot, by typing the built-in '/start' command (or something else, depending on how you defined it in your code).

So the bottom line is, if Telegram is a popular messenger in your geography and for your audience, I'd stick with Telegram as a home for your AI chat bot, as this choice will save your developers' a few frustrating moments and your wallet, a few precious dimes.