I manage the Telegram-channel Ideas for Telegram, which posts feature requests and suggestions for Telegram regularly.

In my opinion the greatest feature of Telegram are bots: Telegram is not just limited to the natively implemented features, third party bot developers can basically add any feature they can imagine to Telegram. Already today you can transfer money, play poker or get the latest news from TechCrunch (and much, much more).

Bots on Telegram can be used in two ways:

You can talk directly to them or they can be added to channels and groups and post to these channels and groups. This feature is mainly — but not only — about the second use-case: Posting in channels and groups.

This is a quick sketch for the latest idea, bot widgets:

Bot widgets

Today, there is no beautiful way to interact with bots in groups and no way (except deep links) to interact with bots in channels.

Bot widgets allow both and more:

You can directly interact with bot widgets by pressing the “+”-button in the upper right corner, which opens a popup (which is basically a deep link with the message-id to the bot). This allows to interact with many different bots without messing with your chat history — and, even more important, with many instances of the same bot, for example many different polls.

Bot widgets can update their messages sent to groups or channels in real time, which allows direct feedback about the latest interactions with the message the bot sent or live updates of the content of a message.

Bot widgets can be interactive (as the poll and comment bots in the picture), or read-only (but self-updating) as the liveticker bot (second example in the picture).

Example: A bot for polls and a bot for comments:

Polls are a really often requested feature —especially since, for example, Threema implemented them natively. There is already PollBot, but it’s very confusing to use, especially for new users.

Comments are even more often requested — a comments bot widget would also have the huge advantage, that spam can be automatically handled by the bot — for example it just ignores messages with links in it, stickers, voice messages, photos or swearwords.

PollBot and CommentBot

These are just two usefull examples, there are many more ideas bot developers could come up with (for example a bot that sends you the weather forecast once a day and updates it every hour, sends you the latest exchange rates, the time when your next bus arrives etc).

You’ve got some more ideas? Tell me at @featurerequests. You can also reach me @eckstein — but please don’t spam me, send ideas to @featurerequests :-)