How to make your bot return random responses from a list.A little bit of the Ruby programming language.Basic terminal commands for creating files and navigating through folders.How to add new commands to the bot’s vocabulary.How to write a Telegram bot from scratch.The more you read around and dream up features, the further you can push your bot. Little programming projects like this are great fun and infinitely extensible. With the knowledge from this guide and a little further reading, you could make a support chatbot for your company, an RSS feed reader, a control panel for your smart home, or a bot that replies using only Shakespeare quotes.

Have a play around with the bot - it’s live here! The first bot I made for Telegram used RSS to find Hacker News submissions that match a search query: That’s why I decided to write this tutorial - it could be a good entry point for aspiring coders to looking something instantly rewarding (and potentially valuable) by leveraging a popular and functional platform. Plus, making bots for Telegram is super easy - the easiest bot creation experience I’ve had so far. It’s a platform that your audience might already use, which reduces friction and encourages adoption. Telegram is a great home for customer-facing bots, with over 200,000,000 active monthly users and an annual growth rate of 50%. It could also include automation that combines helpful resources with live chat, like in the example below from orat.io: In this tutorial, we’ll look at creating a Telegram bot from scratch.Ī Telegram bot could be used with the Intercom API to provide a way for support agents to reach their customers that use Telegram.

With a basic grasp of coding and APIs, you can create genuinely useful software for fun and profit. I’m hardly a master programmer, and you don’t have to be either.

For example, this one that describes scary-sounding places by combining words at random, and this one that paints PNGs in block colors. That obsession fueled my first forays into code, and resulted in a ton of fun bots. I was fascinated by the idea that it is possible to write a program that behaves randomly - to me, that was already deep in the realms of sci-fi! I’ve been obsessed with science fiction since I was a young teen, so coding has always appealed to me.

Create telegram bot tutorial