Creating a Telegram Chatbot Using Node.js and OpenAI: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this article, we will walk through the process of creating a Telegram chatbot using Node.js and the OpenAI API.

Step 1: Install Node.js and npm To create a Telegram chatbot, you will need to have Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) installed on your computer. If you don’t have them installed, you can download them from the official Node.js website.

Step 2: Create a new project Create a new project directory and navigate to it in your terminal. Initialize the project by running npm init and filling in the prompted information.

Step 3: Install dependencies To create the chatbot, we will be using two packages: node-telegram-bot-api and openai. To install these packages, run npm install node-telegram-bot-api openai.

Step 4: Create a .env file Create a new file called .env in the root of your project directory. In this file, we will store our Telegram and OpenAI API keys. To get your Telegram API key, you need to create a new bot on Telegram by talking to the BotFather. To get your OpenAI API key, you need to sign up for an OpenAI account and create an API key.

Step 5: Create the bot Create a new file called index.js in the root of your project directory. This file will contain the code for our chatbot.

Step 6: Add the following code:

const TelegramBot = require("node-telegram-bot-api");
const { Configuration, OpenAIApi } = require("openai");

require("dotenv").config();

const configuration = new Configuration({
  apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
});
const openai = new OpenAIApi(configuration)

// replace the value below with the Telegram token you receive from @BotFather
const token = process.env.TELEGRAM_API_KEY

const bot = new TelegramBot(token, { polling: true });

bot.on("message", async (msg) => {
  const chatId = msg.chat.id;
  const userInput = msg.text;

  const response = await openai.createCompletion({
    model: "text-davinci-003",
    prompt: userInput,
    temperature: 0,
    max_tokens: 3000,
    top_p: 1,
    frequency_penalty: 0.5,
    presence_penalty: 0,
  });
  const generatedText = response.data.choices[0].text;

  bot.sendMessage(chatId, generatedText);
});

Step 7: Add start script to package.json:

"scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
  },

Step 8: Start the bot Run npm start in your terminal to start the chatbot. You should now be able to chat with the bot on Telegram.

In this article, we have shown you how to create a Telegram chatbot using Node.js and the OpenAI API. With this code you can create your own bot and customize the functionality according to your needs.