Yandex Blog

Our job is to make life easier for everyone, which sometimes means just showing them the opportunities they have never thought of before. We are always on the lookout for new possibilities for our users on any platforms or devices.

When Telegram instant messaging service launched its open Bot Platform last June, the new possibilities came up in the form of fun and efficient chat bots easily implementable on the service. When chatting to someone online it's much easier to just ask a chat bot a straightforward question and receive an instant answer without leaving the chat, than going over to the browser window and looking for information. Chat bots are good at providing simple, factual information, such as a weather forecast for the coming weekend, current traffic conditions, or definition for a new word.

To help chatters enjoy their chatting even more, some of our developers have made chat bots based on Yandex services using Telegram Bot API. Most of these chat bots provide information relevant for our users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey and Kazakhstan, but the ImageSearch chat bot and the Yandex Translator bot could be of use to anyone outside of our current key markets.

ImageSearch instantly offers the user a graphic image or photograph from the Yandex.Images service in response to a keyword request on Telegram. Just type what you want to see and ImageSearch retrieves a picture, which can be shared with other chatters in a couple of clicks.To see something else in response to the same request, just type “/more”. Add the ImageSearch bot to your chat and communicate with your friends using pictures, gifs or memes mined from the internet by the chat bot.

Yandex Translator helps you translate words or phrases and talk to anyone in any of the languages currently available for translation based on Yandex’s technology. With Yandex Translator each member of an international chat can type in their own language and the chat bot will automatically translate their words into the language of their interlocutor.

Telegram's stores currently offers over thousands of chat bot programs for every taste or any problem. To help other chat bot developers, whose goal to make life easier and more fun for everyone we share, we have created a free analytics tool, Botan. Based on Yandex’s free app tracking and analytics tool, AppMetrica, Botan allows chat bot developers know their audience better, including gathering information about specific audience segments or learning about which bot commands are the most popular with certain groups of people.