How to Give Your Telegram Bot Conversation Memory with python-telegram-bot and OpenAI
A Telegram bot that forgets every message the moment it replies is barely more useful than a search bar. If you're forwarding user messages to OpenAI's Chat Completions API, you need to maintain a per-user message history array — otherwise the model has zero context, and multi-turn conversations are impossible. This is a common gap in beginner implementations, and fixing it cleanly requires understanding both where to store state and how to structure the messages payload. 🧠 Why the Bot Forgets OpenAI's Chat Completions API is stateless. Every request you send must include the full conversation history in the messages array. If you only send the latest user message, the model treats it as the first message in a brand-new conversation. Your bot isn't broken — it's just not accumulating history before each API call. The fix has two parts: Maintain an in-memory (or persistent) list of message dicts per user Appen...