Telegram bots are one of the most underrated features of the messaging app: here’s how to find them and use them on your smartphone
Bots are one of the most advanced and powerful features of Telegram. The instant messaging service has been implementing them since 2015, and more and more accounts, private and corporate, are using them to interact with users or to provide online services.
Usersers, in turn, can use bots to receive continuous streams of information (for example, from bots connected to news sites) or specific information (for example, from those used as customer service). There are even bots for tracking online shipments. But how do you use bots? It’s simpler than it may seem: to use a Telegram bot, we don’t have to leave the application (or the window, if we use Telegram Web) and we can use the same chat interface that we already know well. The important thing is to find the right bot and, when we have found it, give it the right commands.
Telegram bots: how to find them and start them
The first thing to do to use a Telegram bot is to find it. Online there are many lists (or rather, stores) of bots, divided by category and topic, but you can also do a search within the appropriate Telegram box. Just remember that, by rule, every Telegram bot must have a name that ends in “bot”. So just enter these three letters in the search box and press enter to receive an endless list of bots, and then add the words related to the topic we are interested in to the search. To search for a specific bot, however, we must enter in the box its exact name, which always starts with “@”, always ends with “bot”, must be written without spaces in the middle and all lowercase. Once we find the Telegram bot we are interested in, all we have to do is click on it and then choose “Start”. At this point, the bot will also appear in the list of our chats.
How to give commands to a Telegram bot
Once the bot is started, we can interact with it via commands. Each command must always start with “/”, otherwise it will not be interpreted and processed by the bot. To know the list of commands of the bot we are interacting with we have to run the command “/help”. The list of available commands can also be seen by clicking/tapping on the “/” icon, from which we can also choose and send a command. Each developer integrates different commands into their bots, to meet different user needs. That’s why it’s useful to try all of them in order to understand if, how and how much that bot can be useful to us. To stop receiving information from the bot, finally, just type the command “/stop”.