I Built a Personal AI Assistant with a Telegram Bot Using OpenClaw — Here's How

Author: Nikhil Bhan 🚀 What I Built Imagine having an AI personal assistant that you can text from anywhere — your phone, your desktop, wherever — and it knows you, remembers context, and can even send you messages on a schedule without you asking. That's exactly what I built using OpenClaw, a free and open-source AI agent framework. In under two hours, I had a fully functional, secured, autonomous AI assistant connected to Telegram and powered by Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5. In this post I'll walk you through exactly how I did it — installation, configuration, Telegram integration, security hardening, and cron-based automation. 🧰 What You'll Need A Windows computer (PowerShell required for install) An Anthropic API key (get one at console.anthropic.com) A Telegram account (mobile or desktop) ~90 minutes of your time 🦀 What is OpenClaw? OpenClaw is a free, open-source AI agent that runs locally on your machine. It acts as a gateway between you and AI providers like Anthropic. Key f