Telegram has Introduce a slew of new features in this year’s second spring update, including custom notification tones, setting custom durations for muting chats or auto-deleting messages, and improve forwarding that preserves replies.
Android users also get an updated picture-in-picture mode, while message translation has improve on iOS.
All users can send and receive new animations as well as animated emojis.
Other major feature is a new capability for bots that will allow developers to offer website-like experiences through the instant messaging app.
According to a blog post by Telegram, the first feature in the second spring update of the year is Custom Notification Sounds.
You can now create custom alerts from music “or even memes.” In order to set up a custom notification sound, you can tap a short audio file or voice message in any chat and instantly add it to the list of available notification sounds.
These can then be assign to any chat by going to Settings > Notifications and Sounds.
The app currently supports audio files and voice messages under 5 seconds and up to 300KB in size.
The second new feature for Telegram users is the ability to define a custom duration to temporarily mute chats.
Going beyond limited options such as muting chats for 8 hours or 2 days, users can now pause notifications for a specific duration.
The app is offering customisation for each chat which allowing users to choose from Disable Sound to receive notifications silently, or Mute to turn off notifications completely.
This can be done by tapping ‘Notifications’ on a chat’s info page or Menu > Mute in the chat header on Android, or tapping ‘Mute’ on a chat’s info page on iOS Telegram app.
Next in line are the new Auto-Delete Menu in Profiles, and Replies in Forwarded Messages.
The new Auto-Delete menu will allow users to choose flexible timer settings, such as 2 days, 3 weeks, 4 months, etc, to delete the conversations automatically.
This feature is aim at making a conversation more private, and can be enable from Menu (three dots) on Android or Menu (three lines) on iOS on a chat’s info page in the Telegram app.
Replies in Forwarded Messages is essentially an extension of the Reply feature.
For now when you reply by quoting a text message, it includes a small preview of the conversation that can be tap to instantly jump to the original message.
This new feature on Telegram will now show the same reply previews when forwarding messages to other chats.
This will allow the recipients of a forwarded message to see the full context of the conversation.
You can hide the original sender’s name or media captions.
The next feature is improve message translation on iOS.
Support for translation has extend to more languages such as Ukrainian.
To enable Translation, go to Settings > Language to add a dedicated Translate button to the context menu when selecting a message.
There is an improve Picture-in-Picture implementation on Telegram for Android.
Apart from a new round design for the player window, the new update allows users to pinch it to change its size.
The Telegram app also now has new animations and animate emojis.
Changes have made to the UI for changing phone numbers in Settings.
Animated ducks now walk users through the process.
The new animated emojis include food items such as french fries, pizza, burgers, hot dog, cakes, pastries, ice cream cone, and donut.
Telegram now gives bot developers tools to create flexible interfaces with JavaScript.
With all these tools, developers can create third-party Telegram bots that can offer website-like experiences.
Lets understand with an example, users could order food via a bot within Telegram app.
These bots can also be customise.
Telegram bots currently support converting files, online shopping, processing payments via 15 integrate providers, and other functions.
Telegram bots can also “handle small tasks like chat management by adding extra features, automating processes or helping moderators”.
You can also add bots to their group or channel as well as instantly configure rights and permissions for them.
