The emulator is a built-in replacement for Telegram right inside the application. You write to the bot as a fake person, and the messages travel exactly the same path as a real client’s: intake, parsing, scenario processing, the reply. Nothing goes outside.
Why you need it
The emulator lets you calmly check the scenario before connecting a real bot: no need to create a bot in Telegram, spend AI requests or risk live clients. It works without the internet — you can build and check a bot even where there is no network.
Fake people
Two people are seeded in advance — Alice and Bob. You can add your own and delete unneeded ones. Each has a separate chat with any bot running on the emulator. That is convenient for checking different cases: Alice filled in her phone, for example, while Bob did not.
What you can send as a person
- plain text;
- a button tap under a message;
- a command, “/start” for example;
- following a link with data (“/start booking”) — this is how ad links are checked;
- a group join request.
Failure checks
Separate buttons let you check how the bot behaves when something breaks:
- “break the next call” — the next request to Telegram ends with an error, and the bot goes down the error-handling branch;
- “delay the next message” — the next message reaches the bot after a set time; this is how pauses and the reaction to a silent client are checked.
Resetting the state
One button clears everything: chats, button taps, queues and prepared failures, brings Alice and Bob back and deletes the conversations of bots running on the emulator. You get a clean field for the next check. Bots on real tokens and their conversations are untouched — the reset never affects live clients.
The main rule
Not a single step of working with the platform requires a real Telegram account, a real token or network access. Everything can be assembled, checked and debugged on the emulator. And moving to real Telegram is just swapping the token: the scenario does not need rewriting — it has already been tested.
Next: how the scenario itself works — in the Flow Studio section, what checks exist besides the emulator — in Testing & Debugging, and how to create a bot — in the Bots section.