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Telegram — chat-based access to the kitchen

The Telegram integration lets you ask the AI to look something up or change something in the venue from a chat on your phone — the same kind of edits you’d otherwise do at the admin desktop. Pair your account once, then write messages like “change Margherita to 250” and the bot resolves the dish, applies the change, and confirms in a sentence. Owners decide ahead of time which actions the bot is even allowed to consider, so a quiet evening text can’t accidentally rewrite the menu.

What it does

The venue gets a single shared bot identity — the same handle everyone in the team points their Telegram to. Each human pairs once: they tap Pair my Telegram in Settings → AI → Telegram, get a one-time code, open the bot in Telegram, and send /start <code>. That binds their personal Telegram account to their account on this venue. From then on, every message they send the bot is attributed to them in the activity log — there’s no shared “the bot did it” identity to hide behind.

The bot is mediated by the AI, not by a hardcoded command set. You write what you want in plain English; the AI picks the right action from the venue’s allowlist and runs it. If you ask for something the bot can’t do — either because the owner didn’t allow it, or because your role wouldn’t let you do it in the admin app either — the bot says so plainly and points you back to the admin app.

Permissions are the load-bearing part. The owner sets a venue-wide ceiling of actions the bot may ever consider: a checklist grouped by area (Menu items, Inventory, Suppliers, Recipes). For each paired person, the bot’s real reach is that ceiling, intersected with what the person can already do in the admin app. A cashier without menu-edit rights can never change a price through Telegram, no matter how the bot is configured. The owner can flip “Add new item” off, and nobody — not even the owner — adds items via chat.

The rule

The bot can only do what both the venue allows AND the paired person could do anyway. It’s a chat shortcut for things you’d already be permitted to do — never a way around your role.

How replies appear

Your answer now appears live. A reply bubble shows up the moment you send your message and fills in as the AI writes — instead of a pause followed by a wall of text. Send a voice note and the bubble first shows what the bot heard, so a mishearing is obvious right away, then the answer types in beneath it. Longer answers build a line at a time; short ones finish almost at once. If anything hiccups mid-reply, you still get the full answer as a normal message. And when you ask for numbers — sales by category, top items, this week vs last — the bot lays them out as a neat aligned table instead of a long list. And if you ask to see something — one of your dishes, or a competitor’s food photos from Google (“show me Appia’s dishes”) — it sends the actual photos, not just a link.

How to use it

Open Settings → AI → Telegram in the admin app. You’ll see a card for the venue’s bot with its handle (something like @BiteTheMenuBot) and one of three statuses: Not connected, Active, or Needs attention. The first person from the venue to click Connect Telegram creates the bot record for this venue; everyone afterwards just clicks Pair my Telegram to add themselves.

Pairing your Telegram

Click Pair my Telegram. A small window opens with a button that says Open in Telegram and a short code below — something like H7K2-9MN3. Tap the button on your phone; Telegram opens the bot for you with the code already filled in, and you tap Start. The bot replies “You’re paired with this venue. I can help with…” and lists the actions you’re allowed to do. On the admin side, the window closes by itself the moment Telegram confirms the pairing. The code expires after fifteen minutes; if the window times out, Generate a new code mints a fresh one.

The first time you chat with the bot, say something easy like “list categories” — that confirms the read tools are wired up. Then try a change: “find Margherita”. The bot replies with the dish details from the menu. “change it to 250 baht” — the bot quotes the previous price and confirms the new one. The change is live in the admin app immediately; the Recent bot actions card below the matrix lists what happened, who said it, and when.

The rule: one pairing per login, per venue. Each teammate must pair from their own account in the admin app. If two people share a login — say, the till tablet stays signed in as the owner — the second person to pair replaces the first, and the first one silently loses bot access. There is no limit on how many teammates can pair; the only limit is one Telegram account per login.

If someone’s pairing disappears from the Paired teammates list, that’s almost always what happened: a colleague paired from the same login and took over the slot. Nothing is lost — the disconnected person just pairs again from their own login (create one for them under Staff if they don’t have it). The app now warns you before a re-pair replaces an existing connection, so read that dialog before confirming.

Setting what the bot is allowed to do

If you’re the owner, scroll down to What the bot is allowed to do. The fastest start is to pick a preset:

  • Manager — everything: reads, edit prices and flags, add new items, update stock.
  • Cashier — reads everything, plus mark sold-out and update stock counts. No price edits, no new items.
  • View only — reads only. The bot can answer “what categories do we have” but never changes anything.

Below the presets, each tool is a checkbox grouped by area. The amber Write tag marks anything that changes data; reads are unmarked. Click any checkbox to flip it; the change saves on the click — there’s no separate “Save” button. The bot picks up the new ceiling on the next message.

When something goes wrong

The card flips to Needs attention if Telegram stops accepting the bot’s replies (for example, if your personal Telegram blocked it). The fix is to unblock the bot in Telegram and send any message — the next reply restores the connection. If the Pair my Telegram button is disabled with an “Ask your venue owner” hover, that means you’re signed in but your role doesn’t grant the AI settings page in this venue.

If the bot says it can’t answer something — for example sales figures like “how many carbonara did we sell last month” — that’s almost always a permission that isn’t switched on yet, not a sign-in problem. Once you’ve paired, you stay signed in; you never need to disconnect and reconnect the bot. To let it answer sales questions, the owner turns on the Sales analytics tools (or picks the View only or Manager preset) under What the bot is allowed to do, and the bot can answer on the next message.

Run more than one venue? The bot answers as one venue per Telegram account — the one you most recently paired. If its answers look like the wrong restaurant (or it’s missing tools you enabled on your main venue), open that main venue’s admin and pair again from Settings → AI → Telegram → Pair my Telegram. The most recent pairing wins, so this switches the bot to that venue.

Asking complex questions

When your venue has the smart-routing setting turned on (the default once you enable it from Settings → AI), the bot stops being a single-purpose responder and starts behaving like the in-app chat does. Ask it something that spans two areas — “what’s in the lasagna and what does it cost me?” — and it will quietly split the question internally, route part of it to whichever expert handles the recipe and part to whichever handles cost, and reply with a single coherent answer in your language.

You don’t have to phrase questions any differently. Plain English, plain Italian, plain Thai — whatever you would type to a colleague. The bot picks the right combination of experts behind the scenes and writes one reply. When the venue allows it, you’ll see a short “Routing to Generalist + Analytics Analyst…” line above the answer telling you who weighed in; that’s purely transparency — you don’t act on it.

If one of the experts can’t reach its data for a moment (a slow connection, a temporary service hiccup), the bot mentions it in a sentence and gives you whichever part of the answer it did manage to get. You won’t get a blank “something went wrong” — you’ll get “Here’s what’s in the dish: [list]. I couldn’t pull the cost just now — try again in a moment for that part.”

When you spot a dish worth trying — a reel on Instagram, a TikTok, a YouTube short, or a recipe blog — just paste the link to the bot. It saves the link straight to your Recipe R&D inbox and starts reading the source in the background; a few seconds later the draft (title, ingredients, a short summary) appears under Recipe R&D → Inbox in the admin app. You don’t need to write “save this” — a bare link is enough — and you don’t need the bot to describe the dish back to you first. It confirms with a short line that names where it saved, for example “Saved to Trattoria Sukhumvit — reading the link now, it’ll appear in your Recipe R&D inbox in about 30 seconds.”

If you run more than one venue, the bot doesn’t guess. It replies “Which venue should I save this link to?” with a button for each of your venues plus a Cancel button. Tap the venue and it saves there, naming it in the confirmation — so a link you found for one restaurant never lands silently in another’s inbox.

Worked example

It’s Tuesday lunch, and Marco is on the pass. His sous-chef calls out from the line that they’ve run out of San Marzano — two crates didn’t arrive — and the Margherita and the Pizza al Pomodoro both need it. The till is two metres away, but he’s already wrist-deep in dough.

He pulls his phone out of his apron and opens @BiteTheMenuBot, where he paired last week. “how much san marzano do we have” — the bot replies “San Marzano Tomatoes: 1.2 kg left, par 8 kg — below par.” That confirms the problem in seconds. “set san marzano stock to 0” — the bot replies “Stock for San Marzano Tomatoes → 0 kg (was 1.2).” Then: “mark margherita and pomodoro sold out until i say”. The bot asks one clarifying question — “You have two pomodoro dishes, Pizza al Pomodoro and Pasta al Pomodoro. Which one?” — Marco answers “the pizza”, and the bot replies “Marked Margherita as Sold out. Marked Pizza al Pomodoro as Sold out.”

The public menu page reflects the change before the next ticket comes in. When the supplier finally delivers an hour later, Marco asks the bot to update the stock and mark both dishes available again. Back in the admin, the owner opens Settings → AI → Telegram at the end of service and sees the Recent bot actions card with Marco’s name on every line — proof of who did what.

A few weeks later, Marco is planning to put the lasagna on a special. He’s at the bus stop with his phone and types “Mi spieghi cosa ci mettiamo nella lasagna e quanto ci costa?” — “explain what we put in the lasagna and what it costs us.” The bot reads the question, recognises that the what’s in it part is a recipe question and the what’s it cost part is a cost question, and asks both experts at once. A few seconds later he gets one Italian reply: the ingredient list with quantities, followed by the cost per portion at the current portion size, with a one-line note about which ingredient is driving most of the cost. He didn’t have to ask twice. He didn’t have to type in English. The reply reads like one person wrote it.

  • Your account and venues — Telegram pairings inherit your role on this venue; what you can do via chat is exactly what you can do in the admin.
  • AI credits and plans — every bot conversation consumes credits from the venue’s pool, same as the in-app chat.
  • Audit log — bot actions live in their own activity card on the AI Settings page (kept for 30 days) and don’t mix with the venue-wide audit log.