I made a Telegram Bot
Day 273 / 366
In January last year, I made a WhatsApp bot that allowed you to translate or correct any phrase into perfect English. Today I ported it to Telegram. You can check it out here
Why did I do it?
The WhatsApp bot still gets significant usage. Every time it goes down, I get emails from people asking me to fix it. The only issue is that sending WhatsApp messages is not free. It costs me around 50 dollars each month.
On the other hand, Telegram lets you send messages programmatically for free. And so it was an obvious step to switch the bot over to Telegram.
Making the bot
The last time I wrote a telegram bot was back in 2016. But even today, it is surprisingly easy to do so. I was able to get the bot working in about 15 lines of code in under an hour.
I would like to add that ChatGPT was of no help with this. Writing a Telegram bot is not a very complicated task. And yet the code I got from ChatGPT didn’t work. It had imported modules and methods that did not exist in the actual library. I ended up reading the docs and writing the code from scratch myself.
To use the bot, just click the link at the top of this blog, press the start button, and start sending texts to it in any language.
What’s next?
Telegram bots are way easier to write and most importantly they are free. This was just a quick prototype, but I plan to write many such useful AI-based bots using Telegram.