In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools have required students to declare their health status and body temperatures on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis. The task of declaring my temperature twice daily would often slip my mind, inspiring me to create a telegram bot which will send me lovely reminders.

I started off exploring various currently available options with the following requirements in mind: Able to send me reminders at fixed timing daily (morning and evening) and allow me to snooze the notification

The initial idea was to set recurring events on my Google Calendar, however, my calendar would be cluttered up and hence this would not be a feasable option. Searching around for reminder apps proved annoying and hence I decided to make use of this opportunity to design my own telegram bot.

This bot will send reminders daily starting at 8am and 5pm (Singapore time). With each reminder, there is a button for the user to acknowledge the completion of declaration. When the user presses the button, all previous reminder messages will be deleted and the reminders will pause until the next activation time (8am or 5pm). Without acknoledgement, the bot will continuously send reminders every 5 minutes until the acknowldgement is received.

The backend server of this telegram bot runs on Google App Engine (GAE). GAE allows me to take advantage of the fully managed serverless environment, enabling easy scaling. Furthermore, GAE has free instance hours, allowing me to keep cost low.

Try out my telegram bot here: iangohy.com/demo/annoying_bot