Two months ago, I already talked about how I almost completely transferred all my communication on my smartphone to Telegram and I use other clients for messaging occasionally, and even then, only for work. During this time, Telegram managed to seriously update itself several times, with each new update cool and useful features are added to the program. So, for example, a couple of days ago there was an update to version 3.1; the ability to search for phrases and words inside the chat appeared, the attachment system was seriously redesigned (it really became more convenient) and, finally, a built-in video player from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and other services was added. But we are now interested in another, earlier update 3.0, where bots were added to Telegram. Here is the news on the official website, it tells what the Telegram Bot Platform is and what it is for. I will try to describe it in a little more detail.
A Telegram bot is an account configured using commands to perform specific tasks. The list of possibilities available to bots is very wide; the company even prepared a separate API for creating and configuring bots. That is, in theory, absolutely any user or group of people can make their own bot. Some bots are available only for adding to a personal chat (one-on-one), others can work in group chats, it all depends, firstly, on the correct configuration of the bot and, secondly, on its capabilities and tasks.
A well-tuned bot can do a lot of things. For example, the simplest bots can show the weather or images on demand: you simply open a chat window with the selected bot and write a city to it, receiving a weather forecast in the report. Specify a word or phrase for another bot – in response, it displays the first found picture associated with this set of words.
Smarter bots allow you to rate Telegram stickers or even participate in all sorts of quizzes and polls on specific topics.
Finally, there are bots that are even more interesting, most likely there will be a lot of them in the near future – these are information bots. Any news site or just a portal on some topic can create its own bot, which will provide the user with fresh information, either upon request, or simply dropping it into the feed in the format of links, announcements or even full articles, at the choice of those people who are bot set up. In this case, the user can conduct a kind of communication with the bot, requesting the necessary information from it using commands: news of a certain topic, all articles on a certain topic, and so on. Again, everything here will depend on the specific bot and its capabilities, but in general, the API provides a lot of possibilities for fine-tuning the bot.
For each bot it is possible to create 'keyboards' with a given set of keys for actions. These are simple buttons that send corresponding commands like / command to the chat. Due to such a 'keyboard', the bot actually becomes a mini-application with a simple and understandable interface and in the future one can expect, largely due to the ability to make a convenient 'keyboard' for the bot, very versatile bots.
Here is a short list of bots available right now:
@storebot is the main bot and, in fact, the 'store' of other bots (they are all free). There is a distribution by category, choice of language, top general, by category, by time, and so on.
@ImageBot – the bot responds to requests with images or 'gifs' for a given word
@synbot – a bot that displays a detailed weather forecast for a given city
@HotOrBot – displays photos of girls (or boys) and allows you to mark whether you like it or not
@PollBot – allows you to create polls on any topic and set your own answer options for them
@buktopuhabot is a quiz in which many Telegram users take part at once, every minute there are questions in the chat and you need to give answers to them, the points are calculated in real time
@RateStickerBot – bot for assigning ratings to new stickers on Instagram
@AlertBot – creates alerts with the specified text
@GithubBot – Checks for updates on the GitHub service
@glavburgerbot – throws your location to the bot and in response it sends information about the nearest restaurant where you can have a burger (name, address and approximate time to the place on foot from the point where you are)
@varlamovbot is a bot that notifies about the appearance of new articles in Ilya Varlamov's blog (you can also play the game 'guess the city from a photo' there and watch photos of Martha the cat)
@meduzaprobot is a bot on the Meduza news portal that supports a variety of commands, from displaying the top three news items to searching individual stories
Of course, these are not all available bots, there are already many more of them, I just gave some interesting ones, in my opinion. The list of new bots is constantly growing, you can follow it in the Telegram Bot group on the Vkontakte network.
I don't know if the idea will become something more definite and useful than just entertainment for a couple of days, but the idea itself is just great, and the tools provided to all Telegram users for creating bots are a step in the right direction. Now, thanks to bots, you can not close Telegram to search for pictures, view the weather in a city or read news on the same 'jellyfish' if you are a reader of it. Now imagine that all the major news platforms will make their bots, new, more subject and narrowly targeted bots will appear, and this whole idea can really turn into something more.
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