n8n Chatbot Workflow: Google Drive Q&A with OpenAI + Telegram

Turn your Google Drive docs into a trusted Q&A chatbot—grounded with citations and backed by human hand-off

This n8n Chatbot Workflow answers customer questions by searching your Google Drive documentation with OpenAI embeddings and returning responses with verified citations. If the answer can’t be grounded in the provided passages, it escalates to Telegram for a human hand-off.

What this workflow does

• Real-time chat answering: When a customer submits a question via an n8n Chat interface, the workflow retrieves relevant documentation from an in-memory vector store using OpenAI embeddings.
• Similarity-based sources: It selects the top-matching passages, applies a score threshold, de-duplicates matches, and builds a numbered list of sources with similarity scores.
• Grounded OpenAI response: The workflow sends the question plus the numbered sources to an OpenAI chat model. The model must answer only from the supplied passages and cite them as [1], [2], etc. If nothing is covered, it returns NOT_COVERED.
• Validation and safety checks: It verifies the reply includes at least one citation and that each citation number maps to a provided source.
• Human escalation when needed: If retrieval is weak or the response is ungrounded, the workflow alerts a human in Telegram and returns a hand-off message to the chat.

Use cases

• Provide accurate customer support using your existing Google Drive documentation (policies, guides, FAQs).
• Reduce support turnaround time while maintaining citation-based reliability.
• Escalate unclear or missing topics to a human via Telegram.
• Keep the chatbot up-to-date by indexing new/updated files in the watched Google Drive folder.

Technical details

• Integrations/Nodes: Google Drive (file create/update triggers), OpenAI (embeddings + chat model), Telegram (human alerts), n8n Chat interface.
• Workflow logic: if, set, code, plus supporting nodes like sticky note for clarity.

Setup: Connect your Google Drive credentials, select the folder to watch in both Google Drive triggers, and configure the OpenAI + Telegram connections.