Your Telegram bot

Each server has its own bot, which you create; there is no shared Kotiko bot.

Create the bot

1. In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather and send /newbot. Pick a name (Kotiko, say) and a username ending in bot (like yourname_kotiko_bot), and copy the token.
2. Put it in server/.env as TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN= and restart the server.
3. Message your bot anything. It replies with your Telegram ID. Put it in .env as ALLOWED_TELEGRAM_IDS=123456789 and restart. From then on the bot ignores everyone else.

Using it

Send a word or a question, the same things the toolbar popup understands: shukran, how do you say dog in japanese, da in serbian. what does дом mean shows a card with Add and Skip.

Command	What it does
add sobaka or /add sobaka	Saved at once, with a card to undo it
/list	Your 15 newest words and the total
/list arabic	The newest words in one language
/languages	How many words you have in each language
/remove да	Stops swapping that word
/bases es en	The languages meanings are in, the one you read most first (Kotiko sets them too)
/language es	The language the bot writes in; /language auto follows your Telegram app

The bot gives meanings in the languages you read: the ones you chose in Kotiko, which it sends to your connected server, or else your Telegram app's language.

Voice notes

Telegram sends bots the recording, not a transcript, so the server needs a speech-to-text service. Without one, typing works, and so does your phone keyboard's microphone button.

To run Whisper on your own computer (needs cmake, git and ffmpeg):

git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp
cd whisper.cpp
sh ./models/download-ggml-model.sh large-v3
cmake -B build && cmake --build build -j --config Release
./build/bin/whisper-server -m models/ggml-large-v3.bin \
  --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8178 -l auto --convert

Then in server/.env:

TRANSCRIBE_URL=http://localhost:8178/inference

and restart. Any OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/transcriptions address works too; set TRANSCRIBE_API_KEY and TRANSCRIBE_MODEL for those.

Messages to the bot pass through Telegram, under Telegram's privacy policy.