Ephemeral Messages and Commands

Ephemeral interactions allow a bot and an individual member of a group or supergroup chat to communicate privately on the public timeline without cluttering the chat for other members. They may disappear automatically after some time, or if the app is restarted.

Ephemeral Commands (User to Bot)
Bots can declare ephemeral commands by setting the is_ephemeral field to True in the BotCommand class. A user can then send an ephemeral command that is received by the target bot but remains invisible to all members of the chat, including both users and other bots.

Ephemeral Messages
Bots can send an ephemeral message response back to a specific user designated by the receiver_user_id parameter. Other members of the group or supergroup chat will not see the message.

It is not guaranteed that the ephemeral message will be received, especially if the user is offline.

Reply Targets and Conditions

• Any bot can send an ephemeral message to a user within 15 seconds of the incoming eligible action. The message will be sent to the exact client application that triggered the action. For this the bot must provide either:

  • The callback_query_id from a received callback query, or
  • The reply_parameters.ephemeral_message_id from an incoming ephemeral message.

• If the bot is a chat administrator, it can send an ephemeral message to any non-bot member of the chat at any time without needing to specify a callback_query_id or reply_parameters.ephemeral_message_id. In this case, the message may be delivered across multiple active client applications of the user, but is regardless not guaranteed to be delivered to any of them.