AIIA News Telegram Bot

This is a very simple Telegram Bot which help collecting links for a newsletter.

You can use the Newsletter Assistant without it, directly adding links to an AirTable base, but this bot makes it easier to add links from Telegram.

How to use it

Setup the Telegram Bot

1. Create a Telegram Bot using the BotFather
2. Add the bot to a Telegram group where you and your colleges will send links to it; as bot is reading all messages, you'll have to create a dedicated group for it.
   • To allow a bot to read all messages, use BotFather command /setprivacy and set it to Disabled.
   • To allow a bot to be added in a group, use BotFather command /setjoingroups and set it to Enabled.
   • After you add a bot in a group, you can use /setjoingroups again to set it to Disabled again.
3. When the bot is in the group, run /start command in the group to get the chat id.

Setup the AirTable base

Unfortunately, AirTable doesn't provide an API to create a base, so you'll have to do it manually.

1. Create a new AirTable base
2. Create an AirTable table Weekly newsletter in that base with the following fields:
   • URL (Primary, URL)
   • Type (Single select: 'post', 'paper', 'project', 'youtube', 'twitter', 'reddit')
   • Title (Single line text)
   • Summary (Long text)
   • Comment (Long text)
3. If you prefer to call your table differently, change the name in the news_bot_runner.py file.

Setup the project

1. If you plan to test it locally, create a .env file with the following content:

BOT_TOKEN_NEWS=<the bot token, you get it on bot creation>
NEWS_CHAT_ID=<the id of the chat you'll use your bot in>
AIRTABLE_API_KEY=<API key in Airtable>
BASE_ID=<Base ID in Airtable; to get it, click Help | API Documentation in your base>

2. The project is desinged to be deployed on Heroku. Add the corresponding environment variables to your Heroku app.