telegram-checker

Quick and dirty way to periodically check public telegram channel's preview URL and throw notifications on new posts.

Can send desktop notifications via libnotify and perform text-to-speech conversion via python3-gtts and ffmpeg.

No telegram account or api_id required.

Dependencies

• curl
• libnotify (optional, for desktop notifications)
• python3-gtts, ffmpeg (optional, for text-to-speech conversion)

Installation (example for deb-based distro)

Install the dependencies, if needed:

sudo apt install curl libnotify python3-gtts ffmpeg

Make the .local/bin directory if not exists (optional, just for launching the script without specifying full path)

mkdir ~/.local/bin

Download the script and make it executable

cd ~/.local/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/noisedsn/telegram-checker/refs/heads/main/tgchecker.sh
chmod u+x tgchecker.sh

Usage

Usage: tgchecker.sh [OPTIONS] https://t.me/s/channel_name
Options:
	-t, --timeout <sec>      Timeout between checks, seconds [default: 30]
	-n, --notify             Throw desktop notification
	-v, --voice              Perform text-to-speech conversion
	-l, --lang <lang>        IETF language tag. Language to speak in. [default: en]
	-i, --intro <text>       Prepend a message to be voiced before main text
	-m, --maxlength <words>  Limit the text-to-speech length [default: unlimited]
	-c, --cut <text>         Append a message to be voiced if long text was truncated
	-h, --help               Show this help

Usage examples

On the first launch it will show 5 last messages. It may require quite a time to voice them. So, it's recommended to try without notifications first:

tgchecker.sh https://t.me/s/channel_name

Check every 60 seconds, throw desktop notifications and perform text-to-speech in ukrainian with intro text (maximun 15 words):

tgchecker.sh -t 60 -n -v -l uk -i "Нове сповіщення:" https://t.me/s/channel_name -m 15 -c "... повідомлення скорочено"