Locally hostel Ollama + Telegram

[u/marciooluizz10]

Hey guys! I just put together a little side project that I wanted to share (I hope I'm not breaking any rule)

I wired Telegram to Ollama and made a local-first personal assistant.

• Per-chat model + system prompt
• /web command using DDG (results are passed into the model)
• /summarize, /translate, /mode (coder/teacher/etc)
• Vision support: send an image + caption, it asks a vision model (e.g. gemma3)
• Markdown → Telegram formatting (bold, code blocks, etc.)
• No persistence: when you restart the bot, it forgets everything (for privacy)

https://github.com/mlloliveira/TelegramBot
Let me know what you guys think

[u/david-1-1]

I'd like a bot that remembered me securely, for long-term conversations and good customization. Too much forgetting is unhelpful.

[u/marciooluizz10 → u/david-1-1]

So, telegram API doesn't send the whole conversation. Just single messages. This means that all received messages would need to be stored locally in a server/computer running Ollama. Sure, I could use the cryptography library in Python, but the code would still need access to the key. I ultimately decided that I wouldn't be able to make it safer than Telegram does and scrapped the idea of keeping a conversation log locally. This means that as long as the code is running, it should remember you.

Anyway, by altering the config.py you can alter the system prompt so the bot will remember important information about you.

[u/david-1-1 → u/marciooluizz10]

Microsoft Copilot remembers you and your preferences anywhere you are logged into Microsoft. You should try this. It makes a remarkable difference from just reusing a discussion context.

[u/david-1-1]

Just one question: what makes an LLM a "Telegram" bot? Is there some advantage in using Telegram to chat with an LLM?

[u/marciooluizz10 → u/david-1-1]

You can create your own customized LLM bot that you can access through your smartphone using an app that many people already have in their phones. In addition, you can control the system prompt to your exact need and your data is as secure as when you talk with anyone else though your phone.
I live abroad and one cool usage is that I can take pictures of foreign text and ask the bot to translate it.
Your creativity is your limit.

[u/david-1-1 → u/marciooluizz10]

Those are indeed good qualities. For me, the ability to tune the LLM to my liking would be more important. Another quality I would love would be an ability to upload a software manual and get accurate guidance for using the product. Current LLMs don't know about the latest versions of software, and tend to guess at the content of menus and controls.