coindesk.com
Solana-based communications startup Dialect is out with a "conversational" trading bot for traders who want to buy and sell tokens right from their Telegram chat apps.
Called Dialect Operator, it's the latest so-called Telegram bot that turns texts into trades. The bot receives the Telegram user's command, sets up their order and executes. This can be faster than setting up the trade one's self on Jupiter – so long as the user knows what they're doing.
While Telegram bots have been around for months on Ethereum they're relatively new to Solana. But that smaller ecosystem's recent meme coin frenzy was fertile ground for the type of plugged-in trader that might want to text their trades to a Telegram bot.
Such services are small by the numbers. Solana market leader BonkBot saw $248 million in trading volume last week, less than 7% of the total volume processed by trade routing service Jupiter during the same period. In other words, most Solana traders aren't texting their orders to bots.
Dialect, which has been building various messaging capabilities for Solana wallets for two years, is positioning its own Telegram bot to expand the appeal of text-trading on the go, says CEO Chris Osborn. "I see it as the ideal human-computer interaction interface," he told CoinDesk in a recent interview.
Osborn said Dialect's bot takes a conversational approach to trades. It's programmed to react to direct orders – "buy," "sell," "swap" and "info" – with a pop-up user interface that outlines exactly what's about to be traded, and at what price. It consults ChatGPT to figure out what it's supposed to do when orders don't match the commands.
The bot operates at an arms' length from user assets. Traders must sign orders in their wallet for it to execute. Osborn said this setup is safer than those used by other Telegram bots, which he said store sensitive data on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
Extra safety comes at the cost of speed for the uninitiated Telegram bot trader. Osborn said Dialect is working on improving Operator's response times to reduce lag.
For now, it's only available on iOS but Osborn said Dialect is preparing for Android, the Saga phone and desktop. too.