gpt-4-telegram-bot

Your own Telegram bot, powered by GPT-4. Configure and run within minutes!

What you need

• A basic Python environment
• API Key for OpenAI GPT-4
• Telegram Web client or app along with a token for your bot

1 – Setup your environment

• You need a basic Python 3 environment, on your laptop or in the cloud. I use a $5/month Linux server on Linode (referral link) for that.
• Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/u1i/gpt-4-telegram-bot
• Create a virtual Python env for your project: cd gpt-4-telegram-bot; virtualenv $PWD
• Activate the environment: . ./bin/activate
• Install the required Python libraries pip3 install -r requirements.txt

2 – Create your bot 'personality'

• Your bot will speak with humans, this could be just yourself as a start. Find a name that you like, and use the @botfather in Telegram to create a new bot – along with a profile picture, a description and a token. The token will look like this "6232091381:AAFdcgkKLN92BnPLYikFi5ZYCSQyAz76zXY"
• Edit the file context.json and describe the scenario, add instructions of what language to use, what to avoid, and the start of the conversation – this is, in essence, the prompt engineering that is passed into GPT-4 to set the context, the tone, and give the bot that 'personality' that you want.

3 – Add API key and telegram token to config file

• create a copy of the file config.ini-example and call it config.ini
• add your API key for OpenAI
• add your bot token from Telegram

4 – Start your bot

• Run this command: python3 gpt-bot.py

5 – Initiate a conversation and add your ID

• Chat up your bot in Telegram
• As a safety measure, users need to be whitelisted in order to chat with your bot. It should respond with a message like "Hi Joe – unfortunately, I have no idea who you are. Please tell your friendly human to add ID 446815934 to the list of allowed users. Once this is done please enter /start again."
• Edit the file users.ini and add this numeric ID to the list allowed_users. Specifially, add a "," (comma), followed by the ID. No blank spaces.
• In Telegram /start your conversation again. The bot should now recognize you!