Top 7: Chatbot Builders for Eastern Europe

Salesforce has acquired Fin (formerly known as Intercom), an AI-powered customer service automation platform, for $3.6 billion. Fin enables the creation of AI agents capable of resolving customer inquiries via live chat, WhatsApp, SMS, phone calls, Slack, and more. Fin uses its proprietary Apex LLM models, specifically trained on billions of customer interactions. These models have sophisticated checks and balances to ensure the agent isn't hallucinating. Salesforce said it plans to leverage Fin's team and technology to enhance its all-in-one Agentforce platform.

Bots in Telegram can now send messages with advanced formatting: tables, block quotes, headings, navigation anchors, collapsible sections, footnotes, formulas, embedded media files, carousels, and collages. The maximum length of messages from bots has been increased to 32,768 characters. After the first few thousand characters, Telegram will hide the rest of the message under the "Show More" button. The messenger has also added AI guardians for group chats. Group owners can assign bots as administrators and task them with reviewing membership requests. These bots will be able to use widgets to screen new members and filter out spam or suspicious activity.

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.

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.

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.