Telegram is a popular messenger that developed the ideas of WhatsApp. From the very beginning, the main emphasis was on security (encryption, quick deletion of correspondence, and so on) and additional technical capabilities. And if encryption quickly appeared in WhatsApp, then in terms of the number of interesting 'chips' Telegram will be ahead for a long time.
In version 3.0, Telegram turned into a universal Internet control panel, which allowed you to do almost everything. Monitor the weather, choose products on AliExpress, select interesting films for the evening, translate words from one language to another, look for the nearest ATMs, keep an eye on the updates of your favorite sites, download torrents from blocked sites, play games … and in some cases even transfer money from account to account. All this became possible thanks to the support of bots that anyone can write for the messenger.
In general, bots in Telegram are a very interesting and promising thing that makes its possibilities almost endless. In theory, anyway. But in practice, most of the acquaintances, who at one time actively promoted all the progressive features of this messenger, managed to play enough of them. And somehow, imperceptibly for themselves, they came to the conclusion that they did not really need all these bots in Telegram.
Searching for movies and books? It is much easier and more convenient to do this in a browser (if you forget about such a thing as OPDS). Games? Using a messenger for this is a strange idea. Weather notifications, exchange rates and major news? It is much easier to bring the corresponding widget to the desktop. Looking for shops or ATMs? It will take exactly the same amount of time to drive a request into your favorite maps application. Subscribe to news feeds? It would be interesting not to exist in the world of social networks, Twitter and RSS, where the bulk of users have already subscribed to all the resources of interest. Almost every bot has a simpler and more convenient analogue, which was known long before Telegram. It turned out to be a kind of Swiss knife, which has a fork, a nail file, scissors, tongs and a ruler … but in reality only a couple of main blades are used. Because cutlery, drawing utensils and a manicure set, it still will not replace, even if there are at least a hundred additional tools.
A year ago, the Internet was literally inundated with all kinds of ratings and collections of bots, almost every resource on mobile topics wrote about them. Now that their novelty has faded away, simple scripts with a weather forecast or text games have ceased to inspire admiration, and nothing really came to replace them.
Last spring, Pavel Durov announced a competition for the most interesting and useful bot (the total prize fund was $ 1 million). Its results were announced last week.
The following bots were announced as the most promising:
- @ icon8bot – Allows you to apply smart filters to your photos, similar to Prisma.
- @integram_bot – adds support for a number of third-party services like Trello, Gitlab, Bitbucket
- @werewolfbot – a game somewhat reminiscent of the Mafia
- @strangerbot – dating bot, creates a chat with two random users
- @octopocket_bot – can be used to transfer money, works in several European countries
In my opinion, there is a crisis of the genre, when no one really understands in which direction to develop it further. It seems that the developers spare no time and effort to create complex and multifunctional bots, but why they are needed in the messenger – they can't really explain.
Of course, this is just a subjective opinion, and it may well turn out that among the readers there are a lot of people who use bots to their fullest. So if you know examples of useful bots, be sure to tell us about them in the comments.