Bots are third-party applications that run inside Telegram. Users can interact with bots by sending them messages, commands and inline requests. You control your bots using HTTPS requests to our bot API.

1. What can I do with bots? A chat with @TechCrunchBot also showing search results from the @gif inline-bot To name just a few things, you could use bots to: Get customized notifications and news. A bot can act as a smart newspaper, sending you relevant content as soon as it's published.

Integrate with other services. A bot can enrich Telegram chats with content from external services. Create custom tools. A bot may provide you with alerts, weather forecasts, translations, formatting or other services. Build single- and multiplayer games. A bot can play chess and checkers against you, act as host in quiz games, or even take up the dungeon master's dice for an RPG. Build social services. A bot could connect people looking for conversation partners based on common interests or proximity.

Do virtually anything else. Except for dishes — bots are terrible at doing the dishes.

1. How do bots work? At the core, Telegram Bots are special accounts that do not require an additional phone number to set up. Users can interact with bots in two ways: Send messages and commands to bots by opening a chat with them or by adding them to groups. This is useful for chat bots or news bots like the official TechCrunch and Forbes bots. Send requests directly from the input field by typing the bot's @username and a query. This allows sending content from inline bots directly into any chat, group or channel. Messages, commands and requests sent by users are passed to the software running on your servers. Our intermediary server handles all encryption and communication with the Telegram API for you. You communicate with this server via a simple HTTPS-interface that offers a simplified version of the Telegram API. We call that interface our Bot API.