n8n Telegram Bot → OpenAI: Manage Google Contacts

Turn Telegram messages into Google Contacts updates—using OpenAI in n8n

This n8n workflow listens to your Telegram bot messages, uses OpenAI to understand contact requests (from text or photos), and then looks up, creates, or updates entries in Google Contacts. It finishes by replying back in Telegram with a confirmation or lookup result.

What this workflow does

• Telegram trigger: Starts when your Telegram bot receives a new message, capturing the chat ID, message text (or caption), and any attached photo.
• Vision or text extraction via OpenAI:
  • If a photo is included, the workflow downloads the image and sends it to OpenAI Vision to extract contact details and the intended action as a JSON array.
  • If it’s text-only, it sends the text to OpenAI to classify whether it’s a contact request and extract contact fields as a JSON array.
• Intelligent processing loop: Iterates through extracted items, skipping non-contact chatter and routing parsing failures to an error reply in Telegram.
• Google Contacts lookup (People API): Searches for matches using email first, then name, then phone.
• Lookup / create / update: For lookup requests, it returns top matches in Telegram. For create/update requests, it creates a new Google Contact or merges updates into the first matching contact.

Use cases

• Capture leads by sending contact details to your Telegram bot (text or a business card photo).
• Keep Google Contacts current by updating existing entries when new info arrives.
• Request “find my contact” via Telegram and receive top Google Contacts matches immediately.

Technical details

• n8n nodes: Telegram, HTTP Request, OpenAI (Chat Completions for text + Vision), if, code, no op, and sticky note.
• Credentials: Telegram bot token (via Telegram credential), OpenAI API, and Google Contacts OAuth2 with the required People API scope.