What are the benefits of Telegram vs. Other methods?

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I hope that a few of you can chime in.

I am currently using Pushover with my ISY994a for push notifications, but I see quite a few here using Telegram.
Can anyone tell me what are the benefits of Telegram? I’ve been skimming the board and the Telegram site (not sure that I understand how to get this going) but it seems like quite a few of you like it.

Also wondering about the following and want to make sure that I understand this right. With a Telegram Bot, I could pass messages with embedded actions so that HA can act on my replies … correct? Example: I have a Roomba with Thnking Cleaner. I want to schedule cleaning at anytime between 8:15AM and 9:45AM as long as no one is home. But, I could send a message at 10:00AM asking me “Would you like to run the vacuum?” with a /Start and /Stop option. After receiving the notification on my Apple watch, I could select a desired action.

Am I close?

1 Like
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Yes; it’s extensible like using HTML5 notifications, but apparently much easier to implement. :smile:

I personally haven’t found a use case for it, but your example would be perfect.

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I actually looked into Telegram but decided HTML5 push notifications are “better” for what I needed because I don’t have to sign up for another platform (less things I have to install on my wife’s phone the better). Your example can easily be done with HTML5 if you use chrome/firefox and I do something similar but for turning off lights that were possibly left on.

So for push notifications, you can do most the same stuff, but with telegram you can embed images and stuff, where as with notifications you’d probably link them (html5 only supports icons for example).

One other advantage that Telegram has is it is really a chat client, not a push notification. Therefore, you can send a command from any telegram client to your HA server without being prompted first (via a notification). That allows you to do stuff like this - HASS TeleBot (Telegram Bot) Of course, there are plenty of other ways to interact with HA (REST API for example), so if that is a benefit to you is for you to decide.

Really it comes down to how you want to use it. I decided that going with HTML5 made more sense (no extra app, I can push notifications to my work PC)

As for easier to set up, well, that depends on if you think verifying domains and setting up SSL certificates is hard.

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Wait… with Telegram-Hass route, you can only send “notifications” but you can’t react to it with buttons, right?

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I find Telegram very useful with HA. I modified hass-telebot, now I use it for:

  • opening of the main gate and home door
  • getting a status report (temperatures and clima/alarm status) + a snapshot from a webcam
  • setting the clima (I can choose between four presets)
  • setting the alarm
  • send text messages to google voice (they get spoken through a dedicated speaker, something like "XY said: ")
  • controlling the webcams: on/off and recording on/off

Everything is controlled through “special” keyboards: a sort of dynamic menu system, so you actually don’t have to write a single word.

I also implemented a very basic form of users groups, so that I can decide who sees what.

I’m very happy with this solution!

gl

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Telegram FTW. But sometimes I am wondering is there any self hosted solution similar to telegram. The closest I can think of is Jabber. But I don’t think it has a chat bot and custom keyboard.

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I’m currently using Jabber as my primary notification platform from home-assistant, but never saw any way to send data from the phone/computer back to hass using it.

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Thanks to all that replied, I will surely take a look at HTML5 as well, I agree, the less that i have to install on my wife’s phone the better. Although I do like the idea of being able to attach a .jpg to the message, this could come in handy if I can find a way to tie it in with my cameras.

As far as controlling HA, I may have misread, but the description of this HASS Telebot found here: https://github.com/GussyH/hass-telebot gave me the idea that some commands could be sent back for execution, like /AlarmHome, /AlarmAway and /Disarm.

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I had gotten that impression that you could create a limited interaction

Currently it doesn’t do much apart from allow you to set a list of entities you care about and want to see the states of, and commands to allow the controlling of the Manual Alarm Control Panel component.

from this thread

but after rereading this and the other docs, I’m thinking I may have misinterpreted it.

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…although, looking at the bot api page, it seems to indicate that notifications could have embedded links, though they’d be limited to what @Soul mentioned in the quoted paragraph.

Perhaps by tagging him in this, he can check in and rescue me! :smile:

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Good idea,

If so, I would also be curious to see what it would take to configure a message to send a /Start or /Dock command to my Roomba via Thinking Cleaner. I have to re-read this telebot thread as I was totally confused from the Github readme on how to install this as well.

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My problem with HTML5 notifications is that they don’t wake up my Android phone to give me the notification. Android puts Chrome to sleep, so I only get the notification once I pickup and use my phone. I’m on Pixel 2 XL. I want to get instant notification, so looking to have to switch to something else like Telegram?..

Also, looks like I can’t use PushBullet since I would need to be able to push notifications to the rest of the family members and it doesn’t look that PB supports sending messages from HA to friends. Does Telegram support this?

Update, seems that maybe the issue is something else? I found some errors in my logs.

Error executing service <ServiceCall notify.chromepush_marc_phone: message=<homeassistant.helpers.template.Template object at 0x6ef578f0>>
5:28 PM components/notify/html5.py (ERROR)

Full log here Very unreliable html5 notifications

Thanks,
Smoke.007