Telegram with Siri on CarPlay cannot find the name of a bot to start messaging

[vincentclaes]

Checklist

• I am reporting an issue in existing functionality that does not work as intended
• I've searched for existing GitHub issues

Description

Telegram with Siri on CarPlay cannot find the name of a bot to start sending a message.

Expected Behavior

If I use Telegram in Carplay i want to do;

• click telegram in my Carplay's console
• select or ask to send a new message
• speak "SideKick" my bot's name
• telegram via Siri mentions it cannot find SideKick (while it can find contacts)

Actual Behavior

• click telegram in my Carplay's console
• select or ask to send a new message
• speak "SideKick" my bot's name
• speak message I want to send to "SideKick"

Steps to Reproduce

• click telegram in my Carplay's console
• select or ask to send a new message
• speak "SideKick" my bot's name
• telegram via Siri mentions it cannot find SideKick (while it can find contacts)

Screenshots and Videos

Remove, if not applicable

Environment

Device: iPhone

iOS version: 26.1

App version: 12.2.4

[vincentclaes]

Hi @laktyushin ,

I've investigated why bots aren't recognized in CarPlay and found the issue in the code.
Is there a specific reason bots are filtered out from CarPlay/Siri interactions? Many users (including myself) regularly message bots and would benefit from this functionality while driving.

Root Cause:

In IntentContacts.swift:96-118, the matchingCloudContacts function only searches transaction.getContactPeerIds() which excludes bots. Additionally, TelegramIntents.swift:179 explicitly filters out bots during intent donation:

if peer.botInfo != nil || peer.flags.contains(.isSupport) {
    continue  // Skips bots entirely
}

Proposed Solution:
Modify matchingCloudContacts to include bots that are in the user's contact list or recent chats. We could add a separate search path for bot peers alongside the existing contact search.

Would you be open to a PR that enables bot messaging via CarPlay?

[dijour]

+1 to this

[anbecker]

+1. The ability to speak a group name and/or topic name within a group would also be phenomenal. There’s no reason hands free mode shouldn’t be able to do this.

[suzoo-dev]

Huge +1!!

[huntharo]

Hello fellow 🦞s! (I'm assuming that's the reason for the uptick in interest - I know it's why I'm here)

I have a fix for this working in a local build on my iPhone.

I have not confirmed specifically that it works with CarPlay yet, but "Hey Siri message Claw on Huntgram" works while before it would either pick the wrong contact or do nothing.

The existing code works mostly as described by @vincentclaes with this addition:

1. For contacts that it cannot match by phone numbrer it looks for iOS Contacts that have a Url field set
2. The URL field must have label Telegram
3. The URL field must start with https://t.me/@id
4. The value following the URL prefix is the Peer ID
5. For peer ID 12345 the URL field would have https://t.me/@id12345

Modification Approach

1. Looks through open conversations with single users and gets their peer ids
2. Removes any peer ids already provided by the telegram contact list
3. Adds a check to see if a non-contact-open-conversation peer id has an iOS Contact with the existing Url field format for that peer id
4. If the Peer ID is found as an iOS contact Url, allows that peer to be used in Siri Requests

Why This Approach?

1. Seriously - Looking for some feedback here - if this is dangerous I'd like to know
2. Telegram does not appear to allow adding a Bot as a Contact - Changing this would be a much bigger change not specific to just the iOS app, so this is largely out of the question
3. While a bot or other non-contact could message you on Telegram, that by itself is not sufficient to allow this peer to be accidentally selected as a target using Siri
4. Siri will only allow you to talk to bots that you have explicitly added as an iOS contact using the existing Telegram Url format with Peer ID specified

I'm going to work on this is a little more before sharing a PR or patch but let me know if I've made a mistake in direction.

[bitbeamer]

+1 - talking to my openclaw agent via its Telegram bot in Carplay... this is big

[huntharo]

I've opened a PR: #2021

It works for me. Works with CarPlay. Minor inconvenience, for security reasons, is having to create an iOS Contact for the bot with the existing Telegram peer id URL as the link that allows Siri to resolve the contact.

Caution: Anyone Eager to Try It

Building Telegram is not too bad. Codex can help you get there. It will probably take 1-2 hours to get setup.

But... you cannot test this feature with a free Apple Developer account. You must have a paid account ($99/year) and you have to create ~8 app ids and ~8 profiles and turn off XCode managed signing. It's not impossible... but it's not "click build and it works".

If you do not already have this setup, I'd suggest waiting a bit to see if the PR will be merged / released.

Group Chat Approach Ideas

Is anyone interested in group chats being addressable with Siri?

I have that working too... but it will probably require some input from the maintainers.

There are two possible approaches:

1. Lax security - Advertise groups by name from Telegram as Siri Intents, allowing the most recent groups to be addressed without creating contacts for them in iOS
2. Strong security - Do not advertise groups from Telegram and instead create iOS Contacts for groups using the URL format and group ID - A little clunky, but ensures that you get the group you intended and that it doesn't break or go to the wrong group if a group is renamed in Telegram

I'm assuming only the strong security approach would be accepted and it would be fine with me. But there is some code that appears to be attempting to set Siri Intents for groups, but it appears to only get invoked when you send a message in a chat, which isn't really sufficient for this to work.

[huntharo]

@vincentclaes - It looks like they deployed an update that has this. I had been talking to a Telegram developer that is helping the OpenClaw team and it looks like they got a version of this out. Can you confirm? My tweet and PR linked here show how to use it:

https://x.com/huntharo/status/2039814072016019957?s=46&t=iuVe8hZpZWR0iraGjX0_Mg

[majunze2001]

@huntharo Which version of Telegram are you using? I updated mine, but it didn't work, and there might be an AB test.

[huntharo]

@huntharo Which version of Telegram are you using? I updated mine, but it didn't work, and there might be an AB test.

You created the iOS contact with the Telegram URL label and https://t.me/@id12345 URL format with 12345 being the peer id of your bot? And you have a convo open with your bot?

I have 12.6.1: https://t.me/s/tgstable

[majunze2001]

@huntharo I'm also using 12.6.1, the one released yesterday. I did set up the Telegram URL label and https://t.me/@<peer_id_from_token>, and I have a conversation open as well. Does this require any new version of IOS? I'm on 26.2.

[huntharo]

@huntharo I'm also using 12.6.1, the one released yesterday. I did set up the Telegram URL label and https://t.me/@<peer_id_from_token>, and I have a conversation open as well. Does this require any new version of IOS? I'm on 26.2.

@majunze2001 -

Ah... you have one little difference there:

• Your URL example: https://t.me/@<peer_id_from_token>
• The actual URL needs to be: https://t.me/@id<peer_id_from_token>
  • Yes, the @id is the prefix, so it will look like @id12345 not @12345

This is what it looks like:

[bitbeamer]

Seems to work! Fantastic and congrats to the retweet from Pete.