Playlist Chatbot

Countless times have I found myself in the situation of receiving a telegram message of following kind:

On the one hand I find this immensely exciting:

• A friend takes time to share something with me.
• I take pleasure in exploring music per se.
• Both conjuncted, there is a possibility to bond over music.

Hence there is a great amount of potential!

Yet, on the other hand, it’s a bit of a mess. As seemingly few people do, I use Google Play Music/Youtube Music over spotify (it’s a long story). Spotify links are sometimes rendered nicely by Telegram as to indicate artist/song/album information. Sometimes not. Depending on that, the process of adding a friend’s suggestion to a playlist of mine looks as follows:

• ? Follow spotify link (leave telegram), retrieve song information.
• Open Google Play Music.
• Query song information.
• Add a search result to playlist.
• Switch back to Telegram to thank dear friend. :)

My desire was to keep all of the upside while getting rid of all context changes. This could be achieved by a chatbot. The desired behavior:

• Friend messages chatbot directly with song information in plain text.
• Chatbot queries Google Play Music for songs.
• Chatbot adds highest-ranking result to my playlist.
• Chatbot confirms addition to friend.

Implementing such a bot came with fairly low effort as I found both the python telegram bot api as well as the gmusicapi very user-friendly. Deploying the bot locally with a polling mechanism has also proven to be relatively straightforward.

Remote deployment seemed a bit trickier at first, for Google play music authentication is typically handled via oauth browser authentication. Thanks to the help of Simon Weber I was able to make it run on Google Cloud Functions. This has actually been a surprisingly seamless and pleasant experience. Details regarding the authentication can be found in the project repo.

Update 21/01/02: I updated the bot to rely on YouTube music instead of Google Play music.