Introducing the AlchemyData newsbot on Telegram

“Time spent messaging has surpassed time spent on social networks.”

Chat platforms such as WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger and WeChat already reach billions people worldwide, the current big idea is to distribute and engage on the platforms that already have tens or hundreds of millions engaged.

So while many companies are launching newsbot on Telegram, I’m doing a little experimenting with a cool mashup between the Telegram BOT features and the Watson AlchemyData APIs 🙂

I’m using the AlchemyData News services, it indexes 250k to 300k English language news and blog articles every day with historical search available for the past 60 days. You can query the News API directly with no need to acquire, enrich and store the data yourself – enabling you to go beyond simple keyword-based searches. In details I’m using AlchemyData news to query blogs and on-line websites about “Watson IoT ” topic and every 3 hours my BOT is going to update my telegram channel.

The AlchemyData BOT goes live today. This link will let you subscribe my channel where my BOT posts the Watson IoT‘s latest news directly. Anyone already familiar with Telegram can search from their contacts page for WatsonPOC channel and subscribe from there. Here’s a screenshot from my smartphone:

To update the channel I’m using nodeRED, you can read my previous post here.

I’m using the Watson Alchemy News node that provides you with access to a hyper-relevant, curated dataset of news and blogs that has been enriched with AI. In order to use the service you need to provide a key. Start and end dates for the search must also be provided. The rest of the fields are optional and default values will be used if none is specified. If the list of output fields is empty, only the number of found articles will be returned.

Configuration values will be taken from the input message if available. Start and end date, query, result fields and maximum number of results should be placed in msg.start, msg.end, msg.query, msg.result, msg.maximum respectively. More information on how to build the queries can be found at the API Alchemy documentation.

Here is my nodeRED flows, I’m posting on the channel the first three relevant news about Watson IoT using BOT rest-APIs.

Join my channel to get notified about Watson IoT updates 🙂

Enjoy !