Telegram Business Card OCR to Google Contacts (Mistral + OpenAI) | n8n

Turn a Telegram business card photo into a Google Contact automatically—using Mistral OCR + OpenAI.

This n8n workflow listens for business card images sent via a Telegram bot, extracts the contact details with Mistral OCR, structures them with OpenAI, checks Google Contacts for duplicates by email, then creates a new contact (or notifies you if it already exists) and replies back in Telegram.

What this workflow does

• Telegram trigger: Starts when a Telegram message is received.
• Validates input: Ensures the message contains a photo and a caption beginning with your configured command (e.g., /business).
• Access control: Compares the sender’s Telegram user ID against an allowlist to restrict who can use the bot.
• OCR extraction: Downloads the business card image from Telegram and runs Mistral OCR to extract text.
• Structured parsing with OpenAI: Uses OpenAI to convert the OCR text into fields such as name, company, role, phone, email, and address.
• Google Contacts deduping: Searches Google Contacts for an existing contact with the same email; if found, it notifies the user about the duplicate, otherwise it creates a new Google Contact.
• Telegram confirmation: Sends a success or error message back to the sender in Telegram.

Use cases

• Capture leads from events: snap a business card photo in Telegram and automatically populate Google Contacts.
• Reduce CRM cleanup: prevent duplicate contacts by checking email before creating a new entry.
• Team assistance: allow only approved Telegram users to add contacts via a shared workflow.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/integrations: Telegram, Mistral AI (OCR), OpenAI (information extraction), Google Contacts, plus supporting nodes like if and set.
• Setup required: Telegram bot credentials, Mistral API key, OpenAI API key, and a Google Contacts OAuth2 credential with read/create access.
• Configurable behavior: Authorized Telegram user IDs (allowlist) and the trigger caption/command to recognize business card messages.