Telegram Bots Worth Knowing About

A Telegram bot is a program with a Telegram account. You message it, it responds, and it can act inside groups if given permission. The mechanism is simple and the useful applications are narrower than the endless "best bots" lists suggest.

How they work, briefly

You start a bot by opening its username and pressing Start. It sees the messages you send it, and in a group it sees messages depending on its privacy mode.

A bot added to a group as administrator can see and act on everything in that group. This is the point to be careful about: adding an unknown bot with admin rights to a group of real people hands a stranger's program access to that conversation.

Bots cannot initiate contact. They can only reply to someone who has messaged them first, or act where they have been added.

The categories that are genuinely useful

Group administration. Anti-spam, welcome messages, rules enforcement, flood control, captcha for new joiners, warning and ban systems. For any group above a few dozen people this becomes necessary rather than optional.

The good ones are well established, open-source or long-running, and used by large public communities. Choosing an obscure one for a group of real people is a poor trade.

File conversion and handling. Converting documents, compressing files, extracting audio from video, converting image formats. Handy because the file never leaves the chat interface.

Note that the file is uploaded to whoever runs the bot. Fine for a meme, not fine for a contract.

Alerts and monitoring. A bot that messages you when something happens: a server goes down, a price changes, a build fails, an RSS feed updates. This is the best use of the platform, because Telegram delivers notifications reliably and the bot API is simple enough to write your own in an afternoon.

Personal utilities. Reminders, to-do capture, notes, currency conversion, weather. Overlaps with a dozen other tools; the advantage is that it lives where you already are.

Official bots. Telegram runs several itself, for support, for creating bots, for setting up channels and stickers, and for polls. These are safe by definition and worth knowing about.

Writing your own

This is the underrated option. The bot API is well documented, and a working alert bot is perhaps twenty lines of code.

The steps: message the official bot-creation bot, choose a name and username, receive a token, then use that token to send messages via a single HTTP request.

What this is good for: notifications from your own scripts, servers, home automation, monitoring, or anything that currently emails you and gets lost.

Because you run it, there is no third party involved and no question about what it does with the messages.

What to check before adding a bot to a group

Who runs it. A named project with a public repository is a different proposition from an anonymous username.

What permissions it asks for. Many bots request full administrator rights when they need two specific permissions. Grant the minimum.

Whether it needs to read all messages. Privacy mode restricts a bot to seeing only commands and replies directed at it. A bot that requires full message access should have a reason.

What happens to the data. Anything the bot sees goes to whoever operates it, on their infrastructure, under their retention.

Whether it is maintained. Abandoned bots break, and abandoned bot accounts can change hands.

What bots cannot do

They cannot read chats they are not in. They cannot message you first. They cannot see secret chats. They cannot bypass group permissions.

They also cannot do most of what the inflated lists claim. A large share of "top bots" content promotes bots that distribute pirated media or shared account credentials, and those are exactly the ones to avoid: they are illegal, they are frequently a route to malware, and the accounts get removed.

A reasonable approach

For a group, use one well-known administration bot and nothing else. For yourself, write a small bot for the notifications you actually want. For file conversion, use one only for material you would be comfortable emailing to a stranger.

That covers nearly all of the real value, with none of the exposure.

Mistakes people make

Granting full admin rights when a bot needs two specific permissions.

Adding an unknown bot to a group of real people. A bot with admin rights sees everything in that group, and it goes to whoever runs it.

Sending confidential files to a conversion bot. The file is uploaded to a stranger's server.

Installing bots that distribute media or account credentials. These are the bulk of "best bots" lists, they are illegal, and the accounts get removed.

Not considering writing one. A working notification bot is about twenty lines of code and involves no third party at all.

The short answer

For a group, one well-established administration bot and nothing else. For yourself, write a small bot for the alerts you actually want. Use conversion bots only for material you would email to a stranger.