Subscribe to Telegram sources from the Catalog. When something worth hearing arrives, Announcr speaks (or plays) a short line and keeps it in your Messages history.

Telegram has three catalog entries. Telegram Channels and Telegram Group Announcements can play original voice notes and short audio files when present (see Voice and audio from Telegram below); Telegram Group Activity Summaries is always a spoken recap.

Telegram Channels

Telegram Channels covers every new post on a public channel from the platform's watched catalog (no Telegram login required for listeners).

1. Open Telegram Channels in the Catalog.
2. Pick a channel from the list (or suggest one if the platform allows suggestions).
3. Subscribe — new posts appear in Messages and play as spoken alerts.

In Messages, Telegram items are titled with the channel (or chat) name, not a generic "Telegram" category label, so you can tell sources apart at a glance.

Text posts are spoken with your voice pack (short posts near-verbatim; longer ones may be rewritten). Links are handled like X: unreadable URLs are not spelled out; speech uses the page title/description when available, and a link with no caption becomes "a link" (or "a link to example.com"). Voice notes and audio files up to about 60 seconds play as recorded — not re-spoken by TTS. Longer audio is skipped for passthrough; a text caption on that post may still be spoken if present. Photo- or sticker-only posts with no text are not announced.

Telegram Group Announcements

Telegram Group Announcements speaks from a group (or private channel) you belong to, where the Announcr bot is an admin. The default is pins only — not every chat message.

Listen to a group

1. Link your Telegram account under Settings → Linked accounts (Login Widget) if the product asks you to — same pattern as linking X.
2. Add the Announcr bot as an admin in that Telegram chat (so it can see pins and messages).
3. Open Telegram Group Announcements in the Catalog and pick a group you belong to.
4. When something matching that group's speak mode arrives, you hear it.

In Messages, items are titled with the chat name. A View in Telegram link opens the message when available.

Change what the bot speaks (/announcr)

Only group admins can change the mode (including someone posting as the anonymous group admin). The setting is per Telegram group and applies to every Announcr listener subscribed to that chat.

Type /announcr in the group with no argument to see the current mode. Then use one of:

• /announcr pins — only pinned messages (default)
• /announcr admins — pins plus messages from group admins
• /announcr all — pins plus every ordinary message

Use those words exactly (pins, admins, all). /announcr pin is not a command.

Speak mode is separate from activity summaries — a group can run either, both, or neither.

admins and all can produce many spoken alerts in a busy group and use more audio delivery. Leaving the bot as admin is permission to broadcast those messages to Announcr listeners. Switch back to /announcr pins when you want quiet again.

The bot does not speak other bots, slash commands (including /announcr itself), or Telegram service messages (joins, title changes, video chats, and the like).

Public catalog Telegram Channels are a different product and are unchanged — they still speak every new post on those watched public channels.

How group text is spoken

Pinned text over 200 characters is summarized into a short spoken line. Shorter pins are spoken near-verbatim. Ordinary group messages in admins or all mode are spoken near-verbatim and capped so a long dump does not become a long spoken line. Pinned voice notes / audio up to about 60 seconds play as the original clip (same rules as channels).

Telegram Group Activity Summaries

Telegram Group Activity Summaries is the opposite of pins: instead of reacting to single messages, it recaps the whole conversation every four hours. It is off until a group admin turns it on, and it is a separate subscription from Group Announcements — you can take the recap without every pin, or the other way round.

Turn it on (group admins)

In the Telegram group, run:

• /announcr summary on — start posting a recap in the group every 4 hours, and speaking it to subscribers
• /announcr summary off — stop, and stop storing messages for it
• /announcr summary now — build one from the last 4 hours right away (15-minute cooldown)
• /announcr summary — show whether it is currently on or off

Turning it on stores group messages so they can be summarized — see What gets stored below. The bot replies with that in the group when you switch it on, so everyone present sees it.

Listen to a group's summaries

1. Open Telegram Group Activity Summaries in the Catalog (or pick the group on the Telegram groups page — a group running recaps offers them alongside its pins).
2. Pick a group you belong to and subscribe.

Groups that have not turned summaries on cannot be subscribed to — there would be nothing to deliver.

What you get

The bot posts a digest in the group itself — a lead line plus a few bullets covering what was discussed, anything decided, questions still open, and links shared. Subscribers hear a shorter spoken recap of the same window, one or two sentences long. The two are written together but shaped differently: a bullet list read out loud is hard to follow, so the spoken line is prose.

Summaries run on a fixed clock — 00:00, 04:00, 08:00, 12:00, 16:00 and 20:00 UTC — so every group is recapped on the same boundaries.

Quiet windows are skipped entirely. A four-hour stretch with fewer than 5 messages produces no group post and no spoken alert, rather than six "nothing happened" interruptions a day.

Digests can name people — "Ada raised the pricing question, Grace is drafting the reply". The spoken version does not name participants (a handle read aloud by text-to-speech is noise), and it never reads out URLs.

What gets stored

While summaries are on, ordinary messages in that group are kept for up to 24 hours so a window can be summarized after the fact, then deleted automatically. While summaries are off, no group chat is stored at all — that switch is the only thing that starts it, and it is independent of the /announcr speak mode.

Never stored: other bots' messages, slash commands, Telegram service messages (joins, title changes, and the like), and posts with no text such as stickers or bare photos.

/announcr summary off stops the storing immediately; anything already buffered is deleted within the 24-hour window.

Leaving the Announcr bot as an admin with summaries on is permission to summarize that group's conversation to Announcr listeners. Removing the bot, or switching summaries off, ends both.

Voice and audio from Telegram

Content	What you hear
Text / caption	Spoken with TTS from the category phrase template (your pack, unless a brand voice is forced)
Voice note or audio file ≤ ~60s	A short audio phrase lead-in (category audio phrase template, e.g. "A voice message from …"), then the original recording
Voice/audio longer than ~60s	Not played as audio; caption/text may still speak if present
Media without text or playable audio	Usually not announced on public channels; group pins may still get a short media fallback

History shows a short label (for example the caption, or Voice message when there is no text). Captions on audio posts stay display-only unless an admin puts {{summary}} in the audio phrase template. Keep spoken alerts unlocked so live pins, group messages, and channel posts can play immediately.

See also: X listening · Gmail watch · Signal catalog · Spoken alerts