How I Created My Own Telegram Bot - Pt. 3 Final

Hi there! It’s again me, Alexander Nekrashenko. Today, we’ve come to the final part of my cycle of articles about my story of how I created my own Telegram Bot. In my previous article, I told you about markups and how a bot reacts to events that a user commits. I mentioned several times about the limits in params data that the Telegram API has. So, let me explain first of all how I dealt with it.

The solution was simple, actually, I just created a new table in my database, a kind of paramsData, and now, I can save as much data as I want to the jsonb field “data“ like this

{ "wordsDataIdsParams": "83,84,85,86,87,90,91,92,80" }

After that, I just put into my request only the id of this row, so I don’t care about limits anymore.

It was genius and simple, but I still kept thinking about why I should create my own solution for such obvious things instead of the Telegram developers. Anyway, that’s it.

In this 3rd and final part about my MVP application based on the Telegram bot, I want to tell you mostly about future plans for Tot Bot!

Great application, isn’t it? I appreciate that my users, especially teachers said to me that this bot helps them in their work, it simplifies a lot of their manual actions with some improvements.

Yes, all of that is pretty cool, but let me tell you about some new features that will be included in Tot Bot and make it really application of the future.

First of all, I didn’t choose to make the application into the Telegram platform either randomly, or because that would be easy to build it. It was made like this because Telegram, nowadays, is a super high-quality product: it never slows down, never falls down, never crashes.

To top things off, Telegram is a super popular social platform; I really believe that this is still a very promising product despite the circumstances around its founder Pavel Durov. I can say it surely because I always stay up to date about new Telegram features and I see how it grows.

It was really interesting to work with Telegram API, for example, making my option of a bot that renders a menu every time. But there are a lot of features that I want to implement, and I have been realizing that managing all these words and channels is starting to be difficult. To my luck, Telegram released mini apps, these are the applications inside Telegram but they work like simple web applications.

I’ve already made some updates about the channel’s creation, so now all that the user needs to do to start working with the bot is to add it to their channel. But as you can see in this scheme, this is a plan how to simplify the interaction with the bot. I add a Channel settings page to simplify the managing process. There is an Appearing mode that allows you to set up the words appearing, randomly or consistently.

But all of this stuff will just simplify the user experience. If you are the user of the Tot bot, it doesn’t matter who you are, a teacher, or just a simple user who wants to expand their vocabulary; you can add the words that concern only you.

Let me explain this thought: I think that the education system today is outdated; the main problem is that people who teach other people create their own scripts and teach all the people by their scenario, and this is the core problem of any knowledge, especially language study.

Tot bot was conceived as a platform where all the processes are managed by the bot, users just interact with it, and the role of teachers here is just to create content. It’s because every person needs language for their own goals, like a job, study, or watching Netflix in the original language, all of that stuff is the context of some area of their own lives. And Tot bot covers those needs and helps to achieve the results. You add to the dictionary only those words, that you need in your life.

Moreover, Tot bot can save the context and help you learn your language skills in grammar, for example, in a feature update.

Exercises

Exercises are a super cool construction. But how can we create exercises without teachers, if the teachers are the only ones who can create content as you said, you will ask me.

With that feature, teachers can create their own exercises by request and AI will support them in generating their content; let me explain it to you in more detail.

Create 10 questions and hide auxiliary verb, make 5 questions with Present Simple and 5 with Present Continuous, list it randomly

After that, Tot bot will ask you If you want to use your dictionary.

Yes, I do

That’s it! Genius! After that, you will see the example, and if it suits you, you can give it a name and share this exercise with all of your students.

That is what I’m talking about; you get only the knowledge that you need. Your students decide when they’ve learned the lesson; they also can activate and deactivate this exercise if they need to repeat the lesson.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries will be a powerful feature for teachers and influencers. You can imagine Tot bot as a platform for teachers; it helps teachers make their public profile more in demand. So, cut to the chase, you can create your own dictionary with descriptions and words; it will be like a little lesson for everyone.

It can be private or public, if it’s public, it will appear in a special list, where everyone can see some stats such as rating, usage, and feedback. The topics of the dictionaries can be anything, kind of “1000 words for newbies in English“ or “The most useful words for the daily meetings.“ You can choose any topic, but as I said before, Tot bot can read the context and it helps you to choose the category for it.

Monetization

Stars are the cryptocurrency of the Telegram app.

So, the last feature will be monetization, your students already can pay you with the Telegram stars in your channel, but if you create a really cool dictionary and it becomes popular, I have no doubt that users will appreciate you with stars. It can be your new source of income, cause you really can earn from public dictionaries and the private ones by selling them directly as well.

Conclusion

If you are a coder, you also will see soon my own Telegram API library in open source. As I told you in the first article, it has an easy-to-understand interface and up-to-date methods, types, and interfaces.

Just like my story, subscribe, I appreciate your feedback a lot, it helps me to write new articles and talk about the technologies; thank you very much for this journey, and see you soon. Join the Tot Bot to see all these amazing things in real life.

Telegram: https://t.me/tot_lang_bot

You can find my LinkedIn and subscribe to me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-nekrashenko/