Messaging platform Line ups its chatbot game

Line is ramping up incentives for third party developers to make chatbots, and thereby expand the utility of its platform, as the great scramble of messaging giants applying AI to keep users engaged continues. The South Korean company behind the platform announced its plans to open up to chatbots back in March, going on to allow the first developers to start building bots in April, on a first come first serve basis, with an initial limit of 10,000 bots. It's now taken the stabilizer wheels off its chatbot developer initiative, launching a new Messaging API at a conference in Japan which it's touting as simper than the prior bot API. The mobile messaging giant, which competes with the likes of WhatsApp and WeChat and has 218 million monthly active users, is most popular in Asia, with two-thirds of Line users in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. "These new message types sent by chatbots allow companies to realise a smoother Line-based contact point with users for their services and content," it said in a press release.