“Someone describing Politibot once said it was almost Socratic he had the impression he understood things better this way,” Suárez told me. (Politibot chief of technology Miguel Gil Biraud detailed these new platform developments to me during a pitch event at the Global Editors Network conference last month in Vienna.) The makeup of the eight-person team suggests the founders’ ambitions: On board are journalists, a designer, engineers who’ve worked on natural language processing, and political and data scientists. The completed “bot management system” that other media organizations can use to build custom chatbots includes analytics more useful for newsroom purposes than either Telegram (through Yandex) or Facebook Messenger offer now, and more personalization on the messaging journey of individual users. In Politibot’s case, it’s been more of a working vacation, as the team behind it began building out a full-fledged bot-making platform based on what it had learned from its Spanish election summer experiment, with the help of a €50,000 Google DNI grant from November 2016.

election, and the news and information side of Politibot “went on holiday” last summer to the Spanish seaside resort city Torrevieja.

Then a couple of the Politibot project’s founders, María Ramírez and Eduardo Suárez (who launched Politibot after they parted ways with the Spanish digital news startup El Español, where they were also cofounders) left for Univision to cover the U.S. ( Quartz’s news app and Purple’s messaging app were among the inspirations.) Promoted only through its founders’ networks, the spunky Telegram bot built up a reliably loyal following of 8,400 users. February 11, 2016First launched last June during Spain’s general election as a Telegram bot experiment, Politibot tried to offer Spanish audiences a more whimsical and comfortable way to keep up with a tense political cycle and dissect facts and figures politicians and their parties spouted.

Telegram chatbot builder