Three Asian messaging platforms: built, none of them live yet
Written by the Allinaa team · Updated
Short version: Allinaa has built connections for three large messaging platforms used in east Asia, south-east Asia and eastern Europe, and none of them is live for customers yet. They matter if your customers already message you there. Unlike the Meta channels, what stands in the way is not Allinaa's approval - it is something your own business obtains from the platform, and in two of the three cases pays for.
Status: built and tested, not yet live
| Platform | Built | What your business obtains first |
|---|---|---|
| LINE (not yet live) | Yes, against a simulated API | An Official Account with the Messaging API, in a region where that is offered |
| Viber (not yet live) | Yes, against a simulated API | A commercial bot agreement with the platform's owner - a paid monthly arrangement |
| WeChat (not yet live) | Yes, against a simulated API | A verified Service Account, which carries a one-off review fee for overseas companies |
The fees are the platforms' own, paid by your business to them, and they change - ask the platform rather than trusting a figure on a vendor page. Allinaa adds nothing to them. "Built" means the code exists and passes tests against a simulated version of the platform's API; it is not yet live, so no business can switch these on today.
A free reply, then a quota (not yet live)
LINE, which is not yet live, has the unusual model of the three. When a customer writes, you receive a short-lived token that lets you reply free of charge, and it expires in well under a minute. After that a reply becomes a push message, which counts against your account's monthly quota and therefore against the plan you pay for. The built connection uses the free reply when it can and pushes only when you have allowed pushes, so your plan is not consumed by accident. Two more details: media that needs transcoding is fetched only once the platform says it is ready, so nothing arrives broken, and when a customer deletes a message the stored copy and its files go too. One-to-one conversations only, not groups.
A 24-hour session, then it costs money (not yet live)
Viber, also not yet live, distinguishes a session - a day from the customer's own last message - from anything sent outside it, which is a paid message. The built connection refuses to send outside the session unless you have deliberately switched paid outbound on for that connection, and when it does send one it is recorded against your business, so a bill is never a surprise. Delivery and seen receipts are reported, with a seen receipt correctly marking everything earlier as seen too, and media is fetched only from the platform's own hosts.
48 hours, five replies, and a server whitelist (not yet live)
WeChat, not yet live either, lets a service account reply within 48 hours of a customer's message and limits how many replies that is; the built connection enforces 48 hours and five. Two practical things catch businesses out. First, the platform requires your server's address to be on the account's whitelist, so the account must be configured with Allinaa's server address before anything works at all. Second, the server URL, token and encryption key are shown once when you connect and must be saved into the platform at that moment - they are not retrievable afterwards. Messages can be encrypted in transit by the platform's own secure mode, which is supported along with a guard against a request arriving unencrypted when it should not be, and AI-written replies carry the platform's marker for machine-generated messages.
What all three share
- No cold messages. None of these platforms can be used to start a conversation with somebody who has not written to you first. That is their rule, and Allinaa offers no way round it.
- Credentials are encrypted and never shown again, bound to the one connection they belong to.
- New connections start in human mode: messages are stored and your team is notified, and the AI answers nothing until you decide it should.
- One inbox. These conversations would appear beside the website chat and Telegram with the same take-over, reply, note and assign actions. See one inbox.
- Images and documents follow the same file rules as the website chat. See files customers send.
Whether any of them is worth it for you
The question is commercial rather than technical. If a meaningful share of your customers already message you on one of these, the platform's own fee is usually small against the enquiries it carries; if you are hoping to find new customers there, it rarely is. The website chat and Telegram cost no platform fee and are live-verified today, which makes them the sensible place to prove the assistant earns its keep before paying anybody. See the channel overview for what is live, and Telegram.
One thing that does work today
If your reason for wanting these platforms is that your customers write in Japanese, Thai, Chinese or Russian, the answering part already works on the website chat: Premium answers in all supported languages, 108 today, detected from what the visitor writes. The platform is the part that is waiting, not the language. See answering in several languages and running a chat in languages your team does not read.