Good news for bot builders! With today's release of our iOS, Android and Desktop apps, people will have a new way of contacting your bot: right from the text input field. Works in any cloud chat, the bot doesn't need to be a member.

This means you can now provide users with content to send to their friends (@gif, @vid, @pic, @wiki, @imdb) or transform their input (@bold) – and who knows what else you'll come up with.

Check out our Intro to Inline Bots for more info:
https://core.telegram.org/bots/inline

Stay tuned for more updates here on #BotNews.

You can now build accurate ratings and charts for content shared via your inline bot.

Simply send /setinlinefeedback to @BotFather to receive updates on which of the results provided by your bot got chosen by its users.

To give just one example, you could use this data to return the top-10 most popular results when a user first types your bot's username in the input field (i.e., as an answer to an empty request).

More info here:
https://core.telegram.org/bots/inline#collecting-feedback
This update:
https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#recent-changes

We forgot to announce this, but you can use either HTML-style or markdown-style formatting in your bot's messages to get italic, bold or fixed-width text and inline links.

See this section for details:
https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#formatting-options

The Bot API now supports silent notifications. We've added an optional disable_notification parameter to all sending-related methods.
https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#available-methods

Please note that only users with updated apps will receive the message silently. iOS users will not receive a notification, Android users will receive a notification with no sound. Coming soon to other apps.