Video notes — Telegram's round video messages — have become a genre of their own: in private chats they feel warmer than plain text, and in channels they come across as the author speaking straight to subscribers. But Telegram has a catch: you can only record a video note live from the camera. There's no way to pick a finished clip from your gallery and send it as a circle.
Bots get around that. The idea is simple: you send a bot an ordinary video file, and it sends back the same clip as a round video message. You can forward it to any chat or channel, and it looks just as if you'd recorded it on the spot.
How to make a video note from a video
- Open one of the bots below and tap Start.
- Send the bot a video, or forward one from another chat.
- In a few seconds the bot sends the clip back as a round video note.
- Forward the finished circle to the chat or channel you want.
Bots to try
- ⚡️Voicy — the most popular bot in this list: turns videos, GIFs, stickers, and even photos into video notes, and on top of that transcribes voice messages to text and sends voice memes inline.
- Video Yukla Bot — a downloader with a round-video trick: /round turns a clip you send, or one you reply to, into a video note, and it also grabs videos from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube by link.
- Music Editor — an audio editor that does circles too: send a video, trim it if needed, and get a round video message; it also recognizes music and edits track tags and covers.
- RoundGram — send any video and get it back as a video note, with a choice of masks to frame the circle in /settings; the interface speaks 18 languages.
- BUBLEDUB — for video notes you already have: forward a circle and it comes back dubbed into one of 56 languages, still a circle. It handles regular videos and voice messages too, and the first 10 circles are free.
A few things to keep in mind
The frame is cropped to a circle, so keep everything important — faces, text, the action — in the center. Length is capped at about a minute, so a longer clip has to be split into several video notes. The sound comes through intact. And in channels, video notes work especially well as "live" updates — short video messages that subscribers watch more willingly than regular posts.
More bots like these are in the Video Note Makers category.