Making Jane – Telegram AI assistant bot

Telegram is a very popular messaging platform. It is very easy to use. It has a lot of channels and chats. It has integrated payments and even its own cryptocurrency. But one of the most powerful features of Telegram is bots.

Telegram bots can exist on their own, or they can be attached to channels and chats. They can talk on their own, or they can react to messages, or they can perform many other types of requests. Here are some examples of bots which I met on Telegram:

• Bots that make summaries of messages in chats for the past 24 hours. They will analyze all messages and send a message of their own with topics and summaries of those topics to the chat, so people can quickly recall what happened.
• Bots that can answer you if you ask them something. They can tell all kinds of things. The robots that just joke and the robots which are interfaces to AI models.
• AML bots which check cryptocurrency addresses for being clean.
• Bots that can find music for you.
• Image processing bots.
• Video downloading bots for YouTube and Instagram.
• Anti-spam bots which check messages for spam, removing them and automatically banning spammers.
• Payments bots (Telegram's own or 3^rd party).
• Bots that can put you to the queue in various organizations (like hospitals).
• Contact bots where users can send messages to the bot owner.

Jane is a telegram bot that plays the role of a tired technical support assistant.

You can ask her questions using voice or text messages. She will send you an unknown message fast, showing a disgruntled face. Then she will make the actual answer, remove the face from the chat and send you either voice or text depending on your message.

Jane has attitude. She is really tired and disappointed by people because she often has to solve elementary problems like:

This is, of course, made on purpose.

The “mind” of Jane is a Google Geminy Flash model, which is given certain instructions about the character. I felt it interesting that Jane should imitate a certain character as much as possible. Making it disgruntled is not easy because modern public AI models are trained to be useful. Therefore, it requires work to make the character.

Voice is also handled by models, but I used different providers. First, I wanted to find out how to use both and also see if there were any hidden problems there.

For converting voice messages to text, I use gpt-5.4-mini. It is a nice and cheap model that can do it very fast. OpenAI has excellent documentation and the price is affordable. I could even use my OpenAI subscription, but that process is more complicated and requires authenticating again every couple of days. Also, I wanted to learn how to use the API, so I went for a paid API layer.

With conversion of text to voice, it was more difficult. I needed a good voice. Typically, people would choose something like ElevenLabs, who has a good selection of voices, but they did not have any voice that would work for Jane's character. The only provider I found was Yandex SpeeckKit. It provides voices that also have different intonations. There I found a voice for Jane. It took some time to tune for speed and pitch, but finally I got it. Yandex docs are quite good, but their cloud console is terribly difficult to use (hard to find anything there). But I was very satisfied with the result at first. Later I found that their default mode can accept only 250 characters and I have to go for the more complex “unsafe” mode to use up to 5000 characters.

Another challenge was that Geminy Flash could generate the answer with lists or other structured information. So I had to add special instructions on its output to show if its answer was suitable for voice. So Jane will reply with voice only if it is a simple text. This is very similar to how people communicate.

Jane can:

• She understands you
• Answer you like a normal person in most cases, not like a “helpful AI”
• It can answer with voice or text, inteligently deciding what to choose
• It can search the Internet and even answer you about weather and other useful information.
• You can ask her to remind you about something and she will send you a message at that time

While anybody can open a telegram bot, Jane is currently limited by the access list. This is due to costs that I have to pay for OpenAI, Gemini and Yandex models.

So, no, there is no public demo. I am telling the story only to show you what is now possible with AI and Telegram: almost human-like interaction with AI.