Silent, visual telegram notifications?

So, and forgive me if this is obvious or something, I’m new with HA, but I use Telegram for important messages, so that if I get a message on Telegram I know it needs responding to sooner then a normal SMS message. I see people on here talking a lot about using bots to do automation and provide notifications to a device, but what I’m looking for is actually somewhat reversed from that.

I have a light I can make change colors on my desk. During my workday, I’d like to change this light from white to blue when I have an unread Telegram message. Better even if I can have custom colors for different important people. I am on Zoom call for work (audio only mostly thankfully) and this would keep me from needing audio notifications from the phone, because I don’t always notice when I get the vibration notification, especially if the phone is on its charger.

Anybody know some way to do this with existing home assistant <–> telegram integration? Or even some other way?

You could increment a counter every time you sent an actionable telegram message. The inline keyboard you send would have an action to decrement the counter (and delete the keyboard - to prevent double taps).

You can trigger an automation on change of the counter, if the counter is greater than zero you can turn your light blue in the actions.

This does rely on you physically tapping a “Confirm” or “Read” button using the telegram in-line keyboard you send with each message. A bit clunky, but it’s all I can think of.

That would work for messages I send, but my use case here is messages I receive, unfortunately.

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You could try out the Tasker plugin “Notification Listener” and create a task for incoming Telegram notifications which forwards the message to HA.

I just started with this plugin in order to find a way to read out some mesages I receive over Telegram.

Interesting, that may at least be a faster solution then writing my own integration that uses the Telegram notification API. I’ll look into that, thanks.