What is v12?

Botpress v12 is an open-source toolkit for building, running, and managing chatbots. Instead of starting from scratch to create a conversational AI assistant, you get a ready-made environment with a visual studio, built-in natural language understanding, and direct connections to popular messaging platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, and Telegram. It's designed for developers and conversation designers who want full control over how their chatbot behaves without compromising on flexibility. At a high level, the software provides two main interfaces: an administration panel to monitor your bots and a Conversation Studio to actually design how the chatbot interacts with users. In the studio, you can map out conversation flows, manage written content, and write custom integrations. The built-in natural language understanding component helps the bot interpret what users mean, so it can respond appropriately rather than just matching keywords. A startup founder might use this to build a customer support bot that handles common questions on their website. A product manager could deploy an internal HR bot on Slack to help employees find company policies. Because it connects to so many messaging channels out of the box, the same bot can serve users across WhatsApp, web chat, and SMS without rebuilding the conversation logic each time. One notable aspect is the licensing model. The project is dual-licensed under AGPLv3 and a proprietary license. By default, bots you create are open-source under AGPLv3, but you can switch to the proprietary license through the web interface if your use case requires it. It's worth noting that the project has moved its primary focus to a newer cloud-based version, so this particular repository represents the self-hosted, open-source version of the platform.