How to set up a chat bot for your Twitch channel

When chat is small, you answer everything yourself, and that's part of the charm. Then the same questions come back every stream: what game is this, when are you live, where's the Discord. Each answer is a moment you're not playing, or not talking to the person who asked something new.

Meanwhile a link from a stranger promising cheap followers sits in chat until you notice it, and a raid lands while you're mid-fight with nobody to thank them. None of this is hard. It's just more than one person can do while streaming.

A chat bot is an account that reads your chat and writes in it, following rules you set: answer this command, delete that kind of message, thank whoever raids. You authorise it from the bot's own website, and you can revoke that access at any time.

Twitch marks authorised third-party bots with a Chat Bot badge on their messages, applied automatically once the bot is connected through the official authorisation, and lists them under Chat Bots in your chat's community tab. Viewers can tell at a glance that a message came from a bot, not from you.

Twitch also moderates on its own: AutoMod holds risky messages for your moderators to review, and you can block terms and hold links. A bot doesn't replace that. It adds what Twitch doesn't do: answering, thanking, reminding and acting on your own rules.

A command is a word a viewer types after a prefix, usually an exclamation mark, and the bot answers with a message you wrote. !discord posts your invite, !schedule your week, !sens your mouse settings. You choose the word and the answer, so any question your chat keeps asking can become one.

Start with the three or four questions you answer most, not twenty commands nobody remembers. A good answer is one line, with a link when there is one, and ends the conversation instead of starting a new one.

Two settings keep commands from turning into spam: a cooldown, so the same command can't fire ten times in a row, and who can use it, so a command like a shoutout stays with your moderators.

A shoutout command is worth having from day one. Twitch's own /shoutout shows another channel to your viewers with a follow button, but it can only be used every two minutes and once an hour per channel, so a bot that sends your message with it saves you typing both.

Twitch's AutoMod holds the messages it flags as risky until a moderator allows or denies them, across categories like slurs, harassment and profanity, and it never times anyone out itself. Keep it on: it switches itself on at your first chat message anyway, at a level that depends on whether you have moderators.

AutoMod waits for a human to decide, and a small channel often has no moderator around. That's where a bot helps: it deletes a message straight away when it breaks a rule you set, like a link from someone who isn't a subscriber or a word on your blacklist, without anyone having to press anything.

Decide what happens to someone who keeps at it. A warning on the first deletion, then a short timeout after a few, stops most spammers without punishing a regular who slipped once. Allow links to the sites you share yourself, and leave your moderators and VIPs alone.

Don't make it so strict that new viewers can't say anything. A first-time chatter who sees their hello deleted rarely tries a second time.

A raid, a follow, a gifted sub: each one deserves a thank-you by name, at the moment it happens, which is exactly when you're busy. A bot can post it for you, and for a raid, shout out the raiding channel so your viewers can follow them back.

Reminders work the same way: a line every half hour pointing to your Discord or your schedule. Keep them few and useful, and only post them while chat is actually talking. A reminder in a silent chat is a bot talking to itself.

Read the conversation below the way a viewer would. If the bot posts more than your viewers do, turn something off.

Most bots ask you to learn their command syntax, create or authorise a separate bot account, configure each rule on its own page and test everything live, in front of your viewers. Moderation and thank-yous are often separate tools on top.

None of it is out of reach, but it's an evening of setup before your first stream with it, and every mistake shows up in chat while you're live.

Open Chat bot and pick where your bot starts: Balanced, Friendly, Strict, Minimal or From scratch. Each preset comes with its commands, its moderation and its thanks already written, and everything can be changed afterwards.

In Interactions, keep the ready-made commands (your card, your schedule, your next stream, shoutouts) and add your own. In Moderation, choose what gets deleted and when a warning becomes a timeout. In Notifications and announcements, write your thanks and your reminders.

Try it in the test chat before it goes live: type a command, send a link as a viewer, simulate a raid. Nothing reaches Twitch. The chat below is the same test chat, on a sample bot.

When it does what you want, switch it on, and MagicMateBot says hello in your chat with the Chat Bot badge. The free plan includes 1 bot with 5 commands. Answers to questions and AI moderation use AI credits: 5 answers or 200 checked messages per credit.