Telegram is a great way to receive home assistant (HASS) smart home automation information directly pushed to your Android or iPhone. By creating your own Telegram bot you get a lot of flexibility on sending home automation messages or even images from your security cameras to your mobile phone.
The first step of attaching a Telegram bot with your own home assistant (HASS) environment is to create your own Telegram bot. Contact the BotFather in Telegram as it is shown below and follow the creation wizard to receive your bot secret.
Then configure your Home assistant system to communicate with your newly created bot, as it is shown below:
# Example configuration.yaml entry for the Telegram Bot telegram_bot: - platform: polling api_key: !secret telegram allowed_chat_ids: - 123456789 - 123456780
As a result you can extend all your Home assistant automation scripts to use your own Telegram bot to send out important notifications and images to your phone, as it is shown below:
Read more about Telegram integration and how to automate your home with the open source Home assistant platform within my own ebook available at Amazon.