Say Whatever bot

Note that this bot is a WIP. It currently has very basic functionality and I'm not sure what will be added in the future.

Say Whatever bot is a Telegram bot that reads your messages aloud and sends them as audio. An instance of this bot is currently running. To use it, interact with the bot @SayWhateverBot in Telegram. This instance might not be available at all times and is subject to errors, since this is still a WIP.

Set up your own instance

Environment variables

You can run an instance of the bot by getting a token using Telegram's Botfather. Then add the token as an environment variable TOKEN (i.e., create an .env file with TOKEN=x, where x is your token).

You also need an OWNER_ID environment variable, which is the ID of the user who will be able to use the bot. To get your ID, run the file get_id.py and send /userid to the bot.

Lastly, you need a DUMP_ID variable, which is a chat ID for a group where the bot will send the generated voice recording, before sending it to the user. This must be done because Telegram's API for inline results only allows sending either a URL or a file ID. The voice recordings are sent to the DUMP_ID chat and then immediately deleted.

• Create a group and add the bot.
• Run the file get_id.py and send /chatid to the bot.
• Set DUMP_ID to the value of the chat ID.
• (Optional) Archive the chat, so that its notifications won't appear for you.

Dependencies

Install the needed packages with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the bot

Run the bot with:

python saywhatever-bot.py

Usage

Currently there are two ways you can use the bot:

• Write "@SayWhateverBot" in any chat and type your message after it.
• Send messages directly to the bot, starting with a language selection command (e.g., /enus (em-us) or /ptbr (pt-br)).

You can also run your own instance of the bot by following the steps in the next section.

The bot uses gTTS for generating audio from text. gTTS is a Python package for interfacing with the Google Translate's text-to-speech API.

Commands

Use /help to get a list of commands. Basic commands are:

/start - set language preferences
/help - get a list of commands
/tts - speak in the preferred language

The language options are given below:

/enus - speak in English (US)
/enuk - speak in English (UK)
/enau - speak in English (Australia)
/enca - speak in English (Canada)
/ennz - speak in English (New Zealand)
/enie - speak in English (Ireland)
/ensa - speak in English (South Africa)
/enin - speak in English (India)
/esmx - speak in Spanish (Mexico)
/eses - speak in Spanish (Spain)
/ptbr - speak in Portuguese (Brazil)
/ptpt - speak in Portuguese (Portugal)
/frfr - speak in French (France)
/frca - speak in French (Canada)

To do

• Add persistent storage for bot memory when deployed in platforms such as Heroku.
• Clean up code by using a dictionary instead of listing all the languages.
• Add more languages/accents (maybe allow choosing each separately).