What is tara-bot?

Tara Bot is a personal Telegram chatbot that lets you search for flights and compare product prices through a conversational AI interface. Instead of navigating a travel or shopping website, you send a natural language message, for example asking to find a flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi this Saturday, and the bot understands what you want, searches for real time results, and sends back a formatted list with prices, airlines, and links. The bot connects two main capabilities. For flights, it fetches current prices and schedules from Google Flights and returns the top results with times and direct links. For shopping, it searches Google Shopping and returns prices, ratings, and store names for a given product. A daily monitoring feature also runs automatically every morning through GitHub Actions, checking prices on four preset flight routes and sending an alert message. The AI side of the bot uses Claude, or an OpenAI-compatible model as an alternative, to interpret your requests and decide which search tools to call, looping through multiple tool calls in a single turn when needed. It maintains memory of the conversation within a session, so you can ask follow-up questions without repeating yourself, and it uses prompt caching to keep token costs down. The project is designed for personal use, so only the configured owner's Telegram account can use it. It is built to run cheaply, using free tiers of the hosting and search services, with an estimated cost of about fifty cents per month. It is written in Python, deployable on Fly.io, and open source under the MIT license. Affiliate link injection and a Shopee price scraper are listed as upcoming features.