Quick Start

The shortest path from nothing to a bot that answers. Three steps, all in the admin console — and a bot that has only had the first done is completely silent, which is easy to mistake for a fault.

Before you start

1. A tenant. Everything in Mesa lives in one; the tenant selector at the top of the Bots page decides where your bot is created.
2. An API key for a model provider. Without one, a bot is created but cannot answer. Keys are managed under Keys — see API keys.

1. Create the bot

In the admin console, select your tenant, choose New Bot, and fill in a name, a provider — OpenAI or Anthropic; these are the two choices — and a model belonging to that provider.

Then save. The bot exists but is not reachable yet: it has no channels and no authorized chats. The full field-by-field walkthrough is Creating a bot.

2. Connect a channel

A channel is how people reach the bot — Telegram or Email.

For Telegram: talk to @BotFather in Telegram, send /newbot, and copy the token it gives you. Then, on your bot's page, add a Telegram integration with that token. See Integrations and the Telegram guide.

3. Authorize the chats

A connected bot still answers nowhere until you authorize the specific chats it may speak in and assign it to them. This is deliberate — a bot never appears anywhere an admin has not named. See Telegram § authorize the chats.

Once that is done, message the bot in the authorized chat and it will answer.

Next steps

• Key Concepts — tenants, bots, agents, channels and keys, and how they relate
• Bot settings — context, history and behaviour tuning
• AI agents — how a message is routed to a configured agent