Build a Bot to Communicate With Your Smart Home Over Telegram

The power of Raspberry Pi and Telegram

You’ve got your smart home fully set up. You regularly like to show off with your friends how cool it is to turn on light bulbs, play videos and movies with a hint to your voice assistant, make coffee, and adjust the thermostat with a tap on an app. Congratulations!

But if you’re an automation enthusiast who rarely settles, you’ve probably grown frustrated with the number of apps you’ll have to download and the number of interfaces you’ll have to master to control your gadgets.

You’ll probably have an app for the lights, one for your media center, one for your smart shades, one for your thermostat, and a Google Home app that zealously (and hopelessly) tries to put all of them in the same place.

Probably, most of these apps won’t communicate with the others, and probably many of them won’t work if you aren’t on the same network as your gadget.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could control everything from the same interface, without cluttering our phones or computers with tons of apps, through an interface that is accessible both from mobile and desktop devices as well as through external scripts/integrations, whether you are on your home network or outdoor? An interface that was both lightweight and straightforward to use?

But wait, hasn’t such an interface been around for a while, under the name of messaging or chat? After all, wouldn’t it be cool to control our house, gadgets, and cloud services through the same interface that we use to send cat pictures to our friends, and through a bot completely tailored to our needs, without all the boilerplate/frustration that usually comes with third-party bots?