Make a Telegram bot for ICOs using Telegram’s BotFather in just 10 minutes
Any news about cryptocurrencies in recent times are blanketed with gloom and doom. Stories of exchanges being hacked, scam ICO and just the general waning interest in bitcoins are drawing skepticisms about the whole ecosystem. While there is much debate about blockchain and whether if it will be here to stay, there is no question about AI (artificial intelligence).
For players in the ICO, Blockchain and cryptocurrency space, combining AI with their existing business model offers a sort of reprieve from negativity. AI and specifically AI Chatbots, bolster customer service support and complements inherent blockchain technologies.
With an AI Chatbot, your clients, ICO investors and users can get informed and receive documents about your product/service offerings, ICO updates and the latest cryptocurrency news and prices. Think of AI chatbots as a handy, casual friend that is non-intrusive and answers all your questions immediately in a conversational manner.
Today, we are going to make a Telegram bot for ICOs using Telegram’s BotFather in just 10 minutes.
1. Download Telegram App and Enter Your Phone Number
Telegram is here to stay and is available for most devices and operating systems. You can install it by clicking on the below link:
https://telegram.org/
Once you have downloaded it, you can sign up for a new account by entering your phone number.
2. Search for BotFather in Telegram and Click Start
You should find a search field on the top left corner. Search for “Botfather” once you have located the search box.
Hit the start buttons and let’s create a bot!
3. Create a new bot with a Bot Token
Once you clicked on start, you should be able to see a list of options and features. We need to build a new bot, so lets type /newbot or click on /newbot on the screen. From there, BotFather will guide you and ask for a list of information needed from your end.
In this case, I named the bot superkoolico and I used the username superkoolico_bot. As you follow the steps, you will receive the bot’s URL and the bot’s HTTP API token. IMPORTANT: You will need the HTTP API token number very soon so you can copy the token number now.
4. Use Chatfuel to Edit your Chatbot
Now lets search for another bot again and this time let’s search for chatfuel. Chatfuel is a great tool to make a conversational bot without any coding skills.
First, click on new bots and Chatfuel will ask you to paste the HTTP API token to Chatfuel.
Now click on the link and use the command /chatfuel to start building our chatbot.
5. Make menus with Chatfuel
As you can see, there are whole bunch of things you can do with Chatfuel. You can create menus and buttons, send questions to your potential investors, automate, promote and analyze your bot’s conversation and many more! In the interest of time, let’s just create and edit the bot’s menu.
In this exercise, three menus were created: “ICO Summary”, “ICO Whitepaper”, and “ICO FAQs”. Chatfuel allows you to edit the menu. Lets go ahead and add content to our menu, “ICO Summary”.
Be sure to type your content, press enter and use /back to finish saving the content.
To organize information, you can also make sub-menus and provide URL links.
After entering content and organizing information for our three menus, we now have a basic, working chatbot.
6. Wrap-Up and Part 2
As you can probably tell, chatbots are helpful in customer support, especially when you have little or no human customer support and an ever-increasing number of visitors. A good customer support will only help dispel doubts about the legitimacy and credibility of the blockchain ecosystem.
In Part 2, we will add AI to our Telegram bot. Having an AI Chatbot is in many ways, better than a FAQ. People ask the same question in different ways. Having an AI powered chatbot can help identify nuances in linguistics to create a better experience for your visitors and investors.