Bots on TechBlog - Tarasenko Oleksandr

Bot Dev: How to configure chatbot in Telegram

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In previous articles (part 1, part2) we created chatbot for Telegram. As I promised, here we will configure some settings of our bot:

commands list
profile photo
about text
bot description

Let’s begin by configuring our commands list.

Commands list

Command list represents the commands supported by the bot. Telegram suggests them when user types / in the chat with our bot. Each command in this list has a name, which starts with ‘/’, and a text description. Command name length is limited to 32 characters.

Bot Dev: Write a stateful Telegram bot – Part 2

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the first article, we implemented pretty simple Telegram bot, which gathers user requests to fix something. It’s already can be used in our business while we want to post-process requests with a separate tool. But, maybe, it would be too easy for us, so we will go ahead.

Application Requirements

In this article we will add next features to our bot:

initial authentication of our repairers
requests broadcasting to our repairers
request assignment to the repairer

Telegram Bot Deeplinking

Let’s imagine that we have some separate administrative tool for our bot. And there we defined several unique IDs and assigned them to our employees/friends ( friends-employees? Why not). And now we need to authenticate them in our bot, so we can send them fix requests from our customers. We can use deep linking from Telegram to solve this task.

Bot Dev: Write a stateful Telegram bot - Part 1

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Why do we need all these bots? Why people are talking about them so much? What the bot is good for? Look around, it’s 2017 outside and nobody uses phones for calls only. Even more: today a lot of people prefer chatting to calling somebody.

But, you are still forced to make calls to get a taxi or to understand why your LAN connection is down (oh man, you again forgot to pay for it!). How often are you listening to the music, when you are on hold, instead of doing real business? That’s fine when it’s Bach, but what if it’s Justin Bieber instead? They are just wasting your time!

Chat is a better medium for a lot of people. But, yeah, you still will wait until there is a free person to respond you. Ok, finally somebody responded to you, but what if that person is in bad mood? So it still looks too unreliable and complicated. That is where bots come into play.