listOK – Telegram bot for shopping and to-do lists

listOK is a Telegram bot for keeping track of shopping lists and context-dependent tasks. Try it out in Telegram. I describe the rationale and some technical details in a series of posts.

Please feel free to leave any questions, bug reports, requests or suggestions in the comments below or contact me via email [email protected] .

Features

📝 Basics

The bot can keep track of any number of lists (you create lists yourselves, it is just an example):

Lists contain items which can be either active or done:

🧠 Smart adding items and search

Adding items is smart: if listOK finds that there are similar items in the list it will suggest to use one of them or create a new one. It also doubles as search.

If the list already contains an identical item (case-insensitive), the bot will will just mark it as active, if was done.

🔁 Recurring items

To make an item recurring add to its end *1d (with at least one space after the item’s text), where 1 is the number of days since the item has been marked done after which it will again become active.

For example, if you buy bread on average every three days, the item text may look like Bread *3d. It will automatically become active once every three days – you just need to interact with the bot in any way.

🌐 Languages

English and Russian. Other localizations are possible if needed, will require assistance from speakers.

📱 Create a shortcut for the bot

You can create a shortcut to access the bot in one click from anywhere: your phone, computer, etc. Follow this how to and use the link https://telegram.me/list_ok_bot or tg://resolve?domain=list_ok_bot.

Example of the shortcut on iPhone (third icon):

🆕 Changelog

2024-06-09 – 1.1.0:

• Now you can send the bon several items in the same message by writing them on separate lines. For example:

  milk
  bread
  tofu
  

  The bot will either create new items or activate existing. Smart create doesn’t work in this case.

• Small translation and UI adjustments.

2024-06-02 – 1.0.3:

• Added to the /start command a separate help message how to use the bot in a group.
• Bug fixes and translation adjustments.

2024-05-19 – 1.0.2:

• Returned option to add the bot to groups. I recommend making the bot a group admin right away to allow it react to all messages.
• Bug fixes.

2024-05-14 – 1.0.1:

• Temporarily rolled back option to add the bot to groups due to a potential issue. It will be restored shortly.

2024-05-13 – 1.0.0:

• Now you can add the bot to a group chat. It was a widely requested feature.
  • Important: each chat has its own lists and items.
  • Depending on the group settings you might need to promote the bot to the chat admin, if you want the bot to react to all your messages,. In other cases you need to address messages to the bot or respond to its messages.
• Improved edit mode interface for lists and items.
• Streamlined managing repeated items. Now you can do it with via menu with buttons.
• This is the largest update by far. If you experience any bugs or issues, please report them to [email protected].

2022-02-19 – 0.6.2:

• More detailed response to unsupported message types: audio, video, images, etc.

• Minor improvements and bugfixes.

2022-02-14 – 0.6.1: Add option to copy in one click current name of a list or item during editing and deleting. Helps to avoid retyping it again.

2022-02-13 – 0.6.0: Add recurring items.

2022-02-06 – 0.5.0:

• Added option to delete lists. Important: it also deletes items in the lists. It is irreversible.

• Actions to edit and delete lists is now accessible in the “edit mode”, the same as with items in lists.

• Minor improvements and bugfixes.

2022-02-02 – 0.4.0:

• Now you can search/add items without opening a list: if you have one list, it would work the same as if you opened the list. If you have several lists, the bot will ask which list to work with.

• Improved work of smart item creation/search: if you type exact match for an existing item, but there are other similar items, the bot will offer to choose among them. For example, if you have items oil, olive oil, and sesame oil, in response to oil the bot will offer all three options, instead of just making oil active.

2022-01-13 – 0.3.2:

• case-insensitive sorting of lists and items
• more detailed message on unknown input
• minor improvements and bugfixes

2022-01-06 – 0.3.1: Minor improvements and bugfixes

2022-01-05 – 0.3.0: Add smart item creation/search in lists

2022-01-04 – 0.2.3: Add pagination for done items: now they are split into pages of maximum 10 items

2022-01-02 – 0.2.2: Add popup notification when changing status of an item to make the result of the action more obvious

2021-12-02 – 0.2.1: Minor bugfix and improvements

2021-11-22 – 0.2.0: Add multi-language support and Russian translation

2021-11-01 – 0.1.0: First public release, basic functionality

Credits

The icon in the logo: The Noun Project.