Chatbot Builders for Eastern Europe

2025. Customer communication service Manychat has raised $140M



ManyChat, a chatbot creation service founded by Mikael Yang, son of ABBYY co-founder David Yang, has raised $140M Series B funding round, with the American company Summit Partners serving as the lead investor. Mikael Yang launched Manychat in 2015. The service helps businesses create chatbots for messaging apps. As of April 2025, Manychat has approximately 1.5 million customers in 170 countries worldwide, including companies such as Nike, the New York Times and Yahoo. Manychat is said to send "billions" of messages annually on behalf of users across TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp and other platforms.


2023. Google launches AI Studio for developing chatbots based on its Gemini model



In a move that can only be described as quintessentially Google, they’ve flung open the doors of the Gemini platform, inviting developers in with a flourish and a handful of shiny new services. Chief among them is the rebranded AI Studio, which, in a former life, answered to the name MakerSuite (but really, who’s keeping track?). This web-based wonder is your personal portal to the vast Gemini ecosystem, giving you a front-row seat to Gemini Pro now and the tantalizing promise of Gemini Ultra arriving next year. With AI Studio, developers can easily summon chatbots and prompts, wielding API keys like magic wands to slot them into apps or dive headlong into more complex code in a grown-up integrated development environment (IDE). And just to keep things interesting, Google’s thrown in a generous free quota—60 requests per second—which is the sort of speed that makes you wonder if you’ll ever run out. It’s almost as if they’ve anticipated your wildest ideas and set you free to iterate at breakneck pace, all without the usual "limit reached" dread looming over your head.


2022. Calen AI - virtual assistant that automates client appointments


Georgian startup Calen AI has created an AI-powered chatbot that can communicate with customers. It allows companies to automate any routine conversation across any messaging app: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Webchat, Telegram, Viber, Google Business Messages, as well as phone and SMS. Specifically, Calen AI can accept customer requests to book appointments, select convenient (and available) times, record them in the CRM system calendar, and automatically notify customers if appointments need to be canceled.

2022. New Chatbot Customization in Freshdesk Messaging



An inactivity timer is now available in the Freshdesk Messaging chatbot builder (new name: Freshchat). It allows you to set a period of inactivity in a conversation with a customer. After this period, the bot will, depending on the situation, close the chat, transfer the conversation to an agent, or perform another preset action.


2019. Oracle launches virtual assistant for business


Oracle is trying to keep up with Microsoft and has also launched a platform for creating virtual assistants without programming knowledge: Oracle Digital Assistant. It has built-in capabilities for machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language processing (NLP), which allow the assistant to understand voice commands and identify and learn user behavior patterns. Oracle Digital Assistant can be loaded with a vocabulary specific to the enterprise and its activities and integrated into corporate applications for convenient information extraction. Naturally, integration with Oracle business systems is available by default. Communication with Oracle Digital Assistant can be carried out through popular instant messaging applications such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and through voice interfaces such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa.


2019. Microsoft unveiled its chatbot builder - Copilot Studio


Three years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously declared that "Bots are the new apps" and introduced the Microsoft Bot Framework. However, it was only available to programmers, and experience has shown that it's better when a bot can be created (and edited) by an employee most interested in it (salesperson, helpdesk agent, or HR manager). So now the company is launching Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, a service that allows users to create chatbots in a visual designer without programming knowledge. The resulting bot can be embedded in any messenger or hosted on a website. The advantage of Microsoft's service over similar solutions is its seamless integration with other company software. Thus, bots can, for example, use information from the Microsoft Power BI analytics system or launch processes in Microsoft Flow.


2018. ServiceNow created helpdesk-chatbot platform



ServiceNow unveiled new chatbot building tool called Virtual Agent that provides developers a way to create an automated bot-driven process for routine helpdesk requests. The company claims that you can build these bots to provide end-to-end service. Meaning if you tell the bot you need a new phone, it can pull your records, understand what you currently have and order a new one all in the same interaction — and all within a common messaging interface such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. It also works for customer service transactions to process routine customer inquiries without having to route them to a CSR to answer typical questions.


2016. Facebook launched chatbot creation platform



Bots are the new apps. That's why Facebook has also launched its own bot platform, which allows you to create and integrate bots into Facebook Messenger. Using bots, businesses can provide customers with automated support, notify them of important news, and allow them to order goods or services in an interactive conversation. For example, at a presentation, Mark Zuckerberg ordered flowers from a 1-800-Flowers bot. Bots can send not only text messages but also images, links, and buttons. Companies won't need to study artificial intelligence to create their own bot. The Facebook Bot Engine platform already includes a built-in AI engine for recognizing the meaning of human speech (text).


2016. Microsoft: Bots are the new apps


"Conversation is the new platform. Human language is the new UI. Bots are the new apps. Virtual assistants are the new operating systems," said Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build developer conference. "You'll use bots to order a taxi, plan your day, book plane tickets, and shop online. Or your virtual assistant will do all of that using bots." To enable developers to embed bots in Office, Slack, Telegram, and other applications, Microsoft has provided them with the Microsoft Bot Framework. A separate set of tools, Skype Bot SDK, has been created for Skype to create text, voice, and video bots (see video). Developers also received new tools for organizing interactions between their bots (and regular applications) and the virtual assistant Cortana.