What shipped, dated.

Once you take over a conversation in the Meerlume inbox, the photos, voice messages, videos and files your customer sends show up in the thread, on Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and website chat. Until now the inbox only showed their text.

You can send them too: attach a photo or a file to your reply with the paperclip, or record a voice message with the microphone. On website chat, the customer gets a paperclip once you have taken over. Files can be up to 25 MB, and each channel has its own lower limits, which the inbox tells you about if a file is refused.

A step in a Meerlume bot can now ask for something the customer sends rather than types: a photo of the damage for a quote, a document, a voice message. In the builder, give the step the Photo or file answer type, choose which kinds it takes, and mark it optional if a text reply should be allowed to move on.

It is one file per step, and it shows in the inbox conversation next to the customer's other answers. The preview answers such a step with a sample file, so you can test the flow end to end.

Files from your chats, whether sent in a live chat or to a step that asks for one, are kept for 30 days on the Meerlume Free plan. On a paid plan, Settings → Chat files in the dashboard lets you pick 30 days, 90 days, 6 months or 1 year. After that the file is deleted and the conversation stays, and deleting a conversation, a bot or your account removes its files as well.

These files are stored in the EU with Cloudflare, a provider Meerlume already uses, and are only reachable through your dashboard login. The Privacy Policy now covers them.

Meerlume can now send an appointment reminder on Messenger to a customer who hasn't written in the last 24 hours, as a utility message from your Page with the same buttons. Meta is still rolling these out by country, so where it refuses one, the reminder goes by email.

If you connected your Page before October 4, reconnect it once to allow them. Instagram is unchanged: Meta has no way to send there outside the 24 hours.

Every booking update or reminder Meerlume emails to a customer now says why it was sent and has a link that stops further emails to that address from your business. An address that can't receive mail, such as a mistyped one, is skipped.

When a reminder isn't emailed for one of these reasons, the booking in the calendar says which. An account whose emails draw repeated bounces or spam complaints has its customer emails paused.

The Meerlume website chat bubble no longer shows on your site while the bot is unpublished or the channel is disconnected. It comes back by itself when the bot is live again.

Meerlume now reminds customers of a confirmed appointment ahead of time, with a button to cancel and, where your rescheduling rules allow, one to reschedule. Every calendar starts at 1 day before; pick 2 hours, 2 days or Off on the calendar's General tab.

Telegram and WhatsApp get the reminder in the chat; on WhatsApp, a customer who hasn't written in the last 24 hours gets a template message that Meta bills to your WhatsApp account. On Messenger and Instagram, Meerlume can only send it within 24 hours of the customer's last message, so outside that, and always on website chat, it goes by email if the customer gave an address. Once a booking's reminder time has passed, the booking in the calendar shows whether it went out, and why not when it didn't.

Website chat is now part of the Meerlume Free plan, so a bot on Free can answer on your own site as well as on Telegram. On Free the chat carries a small Meerlume mark, and removing it now starts at Starter instead of Growth.

On Free, emails to customers, such as booking updates and reminders, use Meerlume's standard English wording, up to 30 a day and 300 a month; Starter and above keep your own wording with no account limit. The Terms and Privacy Policy were updated on September 26 to match: they cover these sending limits and rule out using Meerlume to email people who never contacted you.

Meerlume is now in the WordPress plugin directory. Search for Meerlume under Plugins → Add New Plugin, paste your bot's chat code under Settings → Meerlume, and the website chat shows as a bubble on every page, or inside one page with a shortcode, without editing your theme.

How the chat looks and what it says stays in Meerlume, so there is nothing to set up twice, and the Website chat tab in your bot's settings now has a Using WordPress? row with the code ready to copy.

Settings → Notifications in the Meerlume dashboard has a new What reaches you table: for each channel you have connected, tick the events it gets, from requests to approve and new submissions to booking changes, a customer asking for a person, live chat replies and payments. Everything stays on until you turn it off, and the bell always gets everything.

Alerts that a bot is broken can't be switched off, and there are two new ones: a Telegram bot whose token was revoked in BotFather, and a Stripe key that stopped working, which used to leave customers at a payment step failing without a word to you.

Meerlume can now write each submission into a Notion database you choose. Connect a workspace under Integrations, pick the bot, and either point it at a database you already have or let Meerlume build one inside a page, with a column for each question and the mapping done for you.

It is one row per submission, not a log: when the status changes, or the customer moves or cancels a booking, the same row is updated, and a column with nothing new to write keeps what it had. Appointment times are written in your business time zone, and renaming columns in Notion breaks nothing. Notion is on Growth and above.

The Meerlume share dialog now has two links made for the Book button on a Google Business Profile and an Apple Maps listing, with the steps for each. Most new customers find a local business on a map first, and both let a verified business add its own booking link for free.

Use these rather than your share link: Google removes booking links that open a messaging app directly, and a share link with one channel does exactly that. The Book link always opens a booking page for your business first, with website chat at the top when you have it connected, and from there the customer picks where to book.

The Meerlume builder preview sometimes showed a text box instead of services or dates on a newly built bot. It now restarts when the calendar changes, and says why when a booking step has nothing to offer.

We removed Draft with AI from the Meerlume inbox. Notes and saved replies stay.

A Meerlume bot can now charge a customer mid-conversation through your own Stripe account. Connect it under Integrations with a restricted key you create in Stripe, add a Take a payment step to the flow, and your message arrives with a Pay button showing the amount, on Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and website chat alike. Tapping it opens Stripe Checkout with your business name on it, and the money goes to your Stripe balance directly: Meerlume never holds it and takes no cut.

The bot waits for the payment before it carries on, so a deposit can hold a slot, and a link that expires unpaid takes the failure branch you chose. Tell the builder your prices and it charges whatever the customer picked, or a share of it as a deposit. Payments are on Growth and above.

The Meerlume dashboard Overview gains a Taken this month tile once Stripe is connected: what customers paid through your bots, minus refunds, with each currency kept separate and money still settling shown beside the total. The Stripe page under Integrations lists every payment with the customer, the bot and the conversation, and each paid one opens in Stripe.

Payments also show in the inbox transcript beside the messages, paid, refunded, failed or expired, and the CSV export gains the amount, currency, status and Stripe payment ID for each conversation. You hear about a payment the way you hear about a submission, on the bell plus email, Telegram or WhatsApp where you have turned them on, and a payment that completes a booking arrives as one notice rather than two.

Meerlume now posts to a Slack channel of your choice each time a customer finishes a conversation or changes a booking: the answers, the contact, the booking, and an Open in Meerlume button into the inbox. Open Integrations, press Add to Slack and pick the channel in Slack's own picker. There is nothing to build and no URL to paste, and the app asks for one permission only, posting to that channel.

Connect as many channels as your team needs, narrow each one to the bots it should hear about, and send a test card before a real customer does. Slack is on Growth and above and does not use up the webhook endpoints your plan includes.

When a customer writes something like "can I talk to a human", in the bot's language or in English, a Meerlume bot now pauses, tells them you have been asked for, and notifies you. The same happens after three answers in a row the flow could not accept, so a customer stuck on a question is not left arguing with a bot, and outside your business hours the message says when you are back.

The phrases that trigger it are editable per bot under Wording in the builder. If nobody has replied after ten minutes the customer is told you are still coming, and a conversation left alone for two hours is handed back to the bot on its own; both timers are yours to change under Customer messages.

Taking over a conversation in the Meerlume inbox now reads like a chat: your side on the right, the customer on the left, day markers between days, and a marker in the transcript for every takeover, escalation and hand back. While you type, the customer sees a typing indicator on their channel, and on WhatsApp the composer counts down the 24-hour reply window and locks when it closes.

You can leave an internal note the customer never sees, insert a saved reply or save the one you just wrote, and press Draft with AI to start from a reply drafted from the transcript. Hand back is now a choice: resume the flow where the bot left off, start it over, or close the conversation.

A Meerlume bot can now run in Facebook Messenger and in Instagram direct messages, alongside Telegram, WhatsApp and website chat, with every conversation landing in the same inbox. Messenger connects by signing in with Facebook and picking the Page; Instagram connects a professional account through Instagram's own login, so it works for accounts that have never been linked to a Facebook Page.

There is nothing to install and no developer setup on either. Both channels are available on Growth and above. Meta allows a message to offer at most thirteen quick replies with short labels, so a flow that asks a long question may list its options in the text instead.

Meerlume can now send a signed JSON request to your server, CRM or automation tool the moment a submission arrives, changes status, or a booking is cancelled, rescheduled or expires. Add an endpoint under Integrations, choose which events and which bots it should hear about, and every delivery is logged with its payload and a Redeliver button.

Two new steps let a flow talk to your systems mid-conversation. A webhook step sends an event when a customer reaches it, so a lead can land in your CRM before the chat ends. A Call your server step sends a request, waits for the reply, keeps fields from it for later messages, and branches on whether the call succeeded. Webhooks are on Growth and above.

When a Meerlume bot holds bookings for your approval, a request you never answered used to lapse quietly at the appointment time, with nothing said to the customer. The calendar settings now have an Approving requests card where you set how long a request waits for you, 48 hours by default, and how far before the appointment it must be decided.

A request that runs out is expired in time for the customer to make another plan, and they are told so in the chat rather than receiving a cancellation. You get a nudge partway through the window while the request is still open, and a Booking request expired notification if it runs out.

The Meerlume builder now takes a description spoken aloud: press the microphone and dictate, and the words land in the field as you speak. Dictation runs in your browser, on Chrome, Edge and Safari, and Meerlume never receives the audio.

You can also attach up to two PDFs or images, such as a menu, a price list or a brochure, instead of retyping them. "Here is my menu" plus a PDF is a complete description. Both work on the landing page, on the build page and in the builder chat once the bot exists. Attached files are read to build the bot and are not kept afterwards.

The Meerlume builder chat now replies in the language you write in, even when the bot itself is in another one. It remembers the last twenty turns of your conversation, so "undo that" and "make it shorter" refer to what you just did, and it knows the bot's current state, so asking about Telegram gets a link to the channel settings instead of instructions to set it up by hand.

A message that changes nothing, such as a question, no longer rewrites the flow: the canvas stays exactly as it was until you ask for an edit.

The Meerlume landing page, guides, pricing and every other public page have a new visual language, and the public pages now follow your system's light or dark setting, with a switcher in the navigation. The builder and the dashboard pick up the same language: the edit view is three panes side by side, chat, editor and preview, and the dashboard's cards are flatter and quieter.

Every guide screenshot was recaptured to match. Nothing about how a bot works has changed.

When a customer books through a Meerlume bot on website chat, the confirmation now ends with a six-character booking reference and a personal link. The link opens on any device and lets them reschedule or cancel later, even after the chat tab has closed, which was the one place a customer had no way back to their booking.

You see the same reference beside the customer's name and time in the inbox, so someone ringing up quoting it is found straight away. If a customer loses the link, open the booking in the inbox and press Show link to send them the same one again. Telegram and WhatsApp are unchanged: those conversations keep the confirmation and its Reschedule and Cancel buttons.

The Meerlume calendar settings now decide how close to an appointment a customer can still move it. Switch rescheduling off entirely, or set a cutoff such as 2 hours or 1 day, after which the bot tells the customer the booking can no longer be moved and asks them to contact you.

Cancelling stays open to the customer at any time, because a customer who cannot come and cannot say so becomes a no-show rather than a freed slot. Instead you set a late-cancellation window: a customer cancelling inside it is warned that your policy may apply before they confirm, and your notification is marked as a late cancellation. Existing calendars keep no cutoff until you set one.

The Meerlume inbox and contacts pages now have an Export CSV button, so your submissions and leads can go into a spreadsheet, a CRM or an email tool without retyping.

The file follows whatever you have narrowed the page to: the inbox tab, the bot filter and your search all carry into it. Answers are laid out one column per question, and every timestamp is written in your business time zone with the zone named in the column header.

A Meerlume bot can now answer on your own site as a website chat widget: paste one script tag and the same bot that replies on Telegram and WhatsApp replies there too, into the same inbox.

The widget's colours and greeting are set from the bot's Website chat tab, and the channel is available on Starter and above.

Customers who book through a Meerlume bot on WhatsApp or website chat can now reschedule or cancel their own appointment inside the conversation, instead of messaging you to ask.

The booking confirmation carries the options, and any change they make shows on your calendar straight away. Telegram bots have offered this since launch.

Every published Meerlume bot now has a short share link and a matching QR code, so you can send customers to your Telegram or WhatsApp bot from a menu, a shop window, an email signature or a link in bio.

Download the code as PNG or SVG, or print it straight from the share dialog. The link belongs to the bot, so it keeps working when you add or change channels.

The Meerlume share link now has a switch per channel, so a bot that is live on Telegram, WhatsApp and website chat can still offer customers just the one you want them to use.

Switch a channel off and the share page stops listing it, without unpublishing the bot or breaking any QR code you have already printed.