We’re excited to announce the launch of our first artificial intelligence-powered news bot on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. We teamed up with Chatfuel to build the bot, and after a month of development we’re thrilled to show it off to the world. If you are already on Telegram, you can check out the bot by following this link (or search for “techcrunchbot” within the platform).
What can it do?
The goal of the bot is to help you stay on top of the topics and stories you care about the most. You can subscribe to different topics, authors or sections of the site, and the bot will send you news articles from TechCrunch about the things you are interested in the most. For example, I’m subscribed to news about Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.
The bot will send you a digest of trending stories about the topics you want twice a day. By default it will send you the most popular stories.
You can also ask the bot questions like “Who is Jack Dorsey?” or “What is Disrupt?”

 
The bots are taking over, but we still want human feedback
This is our first crack at a bot, and we know it’s not perfect. Maybe one day we can get the bot to Tony Stark level, but until then, we need your help. There’s a “feedback” section, and I encourage you to submit thoughts on the bot and help us improve its functionality.
Follow the bot here on Telegram, and check out a few pics of it in action below.
