How to make a telegram bot

What is Bot?

According to Wikipedia, It is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. In other terms, It is a program written to mimic human behaviour in order to perform some tasks. Bots take input and do simple and repetitive tasks, which is much faster than humans.

There are two types of bots:

• Good Bots: Bots that are beneficial to organizations as well as individuals such as ChatBots, Social Media bots, etc
• Bad Bots: These are the bots that are used to perform malicious activities such as Scraping and Spamming.

In this, We will make Telegram Chatbot, which would send a copy of the input that the user has sent.

Making our Telegram Chatbot

We will be using Python language to make the bot and will be using Telegram package for our bot. You can know more about the telegram package from here

Firstly, we will generate our telegram token. Below are the steps to follow to generate your own token.

1. Search BotFather on Telegram.
2. Type /start to get started.
3. Type /newbot to get a bot.
4. Enter your Bot name and unique Username, which should end with the bot.
5. Then, you would get your Bot token.

After generating our token, we will make a python program to create a Telegram bot that will send the Text, Emojis, and Stickers similar to the user's input.

• Importing libraries required.

import logging
from telegram.ext import Updater, Filters, CommandHandler, MessageHandler

logging.basicConfig(format='%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s',     #take time,level,name
                    level=logging.INFO)
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

This script does a basic configuration for the logging system. It takes time, level, and name.

• Now, we will make a variable Token, which will take your Telegram token.

TOKEN = "ENTER YOUR TOKEN"  

• After writing the token, we will make some functions that our bot will perform.

def start(bot,update):
    name  = update.message.from_user.first_name  #first name of the user messaging
    reply = "Hi!! {}".format(name)
    bot.send_message(chat_id = update.message.chat_id, text = reply)      #sending message

def help(bot,update):
    reply = "How can I help You"
    bot.send_message(chat_id = update.message.chat_id, text = reply)  #sending message

def echo_text(bot,update):
    reply = update.message.text
    bot.send_message(chat_id = update.message.chat_id, text = reply)

def sticker(bot,update):
    reply = update.message.sticker.file_id
    bot.send_sticker(chat_id = update.message.chat_id, sticker = reply)

def error(bot,update):
    logger.error("Shit!! Update {} caused error {}".format(update,update.error))

start function would be taking the user's input and would be sending, Hi, with the user's name.

help function will prompt the message of how can I help you.

echo_text and sticker function will send the same message or the stickers which the user has sent.

error function would be printing the error message on the command prompt.

• Finally, we will make the main function, which would be executed first on running the program. It will take the updates and handle the updates.

def main():
    updater = Updater(TOKEN)  #take the updates
    dp = updater.dispatcher   #handle the updates

    dp.add_handler(CommandHandler("start", start))
    dp.add_handler(CommandHandler("help", help))
    dp.add_handler(MessageHandler(Filters.text, echo_text))   #if the user sends text
    dp.add_handler(MessageHandler(Filters.sticker, sticker))  #if the user sends sticker
    dp.add_error_handler(error)
    updater.start_polling()
    logger.info("Started...")
    updater.idle()

if __name__=="__main__":
    main()

Save the program and execute it to check the working of the telegram bot on telegram.

You can get the source code to make the Telegram bot from this Github Repository Bot :robot:. You can also make some changes to the code to make the bot do cool stuff such as Getting News, Articles, or Movies recommendations.