Microsoft Launches Copilot Bot for Telegram in Beta

Microsoft has launched a new Copilot bot for Telegram in beta. The AI chatbot can be used on all platforms where Telegram is available, though it currently has some limitations.

As of today, Copilot for Telegram only supports text chats and it can’t generate images. While the AI assistant lets users ask follow-up questions, each conversation will have a limited number of interactions. There’s also a limit of 30 turns per day.

Before you can start using Copilot in Telegram, you’ll need to go through a one-time verification of your mobile phone number linked with your Telegram account to offer a “secure experience.” While that may turn some people off, Microsoft says that it doesn’t store these phone numbers.

Microsoft has already made its Copilot chatbot accessible within Skype, and it’s also available in Teams chats and meetings for commercial customers with a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. However, Telegram is much more popular with over 900 million monthly active users, and Microsoft may want to try to get this massive userbase hooked on its AI chatbot.

If you use Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, Meta also recently made its Meta AI assistant available in more than a dozen English-speaking countries. While Meta AI may not get as much attention as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot, but Meta’s apps currently have more than 3 billion daily users, so the potential is here. Meta AI also now has a web interface, and Meta open-sourced the Llama 3 large language model behind it.