How to save Telegram voice notes using Python

Mon May 09 2022

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to download Telegram voice notes using the python-telegram-bot (opens new window) package.

1. Install the python-telegram-bot package

Firstly, we need to install the package:

pip install python-telegram-bot~=13.11

Version 20 is still in pre-release at the time of writing and will contain breaking changes, so we need to install a compatible release (opens new window) for version 13.11 above.

2. Create a Telegram bot

We can follow the instructions from Telegram's Bot API documentation (opens new window) to create a new Telegram bot:

1. Open a new chat with the BotFather (opens new window).
2. Type /newbot to create a new bot and give it a name and username, e.g. "My Voice Bot" and "my_voice_bot".
3. Save the token that was returned, e.g. 12345:tokenabc.

3. Write a handler for the bot using Python

If you haven't used python-telegram-bot before, going through the Your First Bot (opens new window) documentation now will give you much better understanding of what we're going to do below.

Some of the python-telegram-bot features that we will be using below include:

• The Updater (opens new window) which allows us to write code to interact with the bot.
• A MessageHandler (opens new window) to receive all types of Telegram messages.
• filters (opens new window) which we'll use to select only voice notes.
• The Bot.get_file (opens new window) method to get data about the file and prepare it for download.
• The File.download (opens new window) method to finally download the file.

Putting this all together, we get:

from telegram import Update
from telegram.ext import Updater, CallbackContext, MessageHandler, Filters


def get_voice(update: Update, context: CallbackContext) -> None:
    new_file = context.bot.get_file(update.message.voice.file_id)
    new_file.download("voice_note.ogg")
    update.message.reply_text('Voice note saved')

updater = Updater("TOKEN")

updater.dispatcher.add_handler(MessageHandler(Filters.voice , get_voice))

updater.start_polling()
updater.idle()

We can save the code above in a file called bot.py and run it with python bot.py.

Try it out

Now we can try it out! Open a new Telegram chat with your bot. You can open a chat in your browser using a link like t.me/<bot_username>.

Send a voice note and voila! After your voice note has been sent, you should receive a "Voice note saved" message and see a file called "voice_note.ogg" in your local directory: