In recent times, organizations have been competing with one another to implement chatbots for various reasons, including enhancing customer experience, streamlining processes, and fueling the demand for digital and innovative technologies. Cognitive technologies such as chatbots have become an apt candidate for end-use application as they have high automation feasibility, high potential of accuracy, low complexity and low execution time. Raising the bar through intelligence, virtual assistants have been propelled by advancements of mobile technology. Technology giants are putting their weight on a platform designed to answer ad-hoc queries in real-time and fuel sales as chatbots can remember customer preference and use order history to learn from customer responses to the product advertisements, suggest products, and cross-sell aptly. For instance, if a customer asks for a pizza recommendation with a chatbot, it can remember which pizza the customer ordered and follow up with it when offering a recommendation for another pizza or a restaurant.

As Facebook prepares to launch its new cryptocurrency Libra in 2020, it's putting the pieces in place to help it run. In one of the latest developments, it has acquired Servicefriend, a startup that built bots -- chat clients for messaging apps based on artificial intelligence -- to help customer service teams, TechCrunch has confirmed. The news was first reported in Israel, where Servicefriend is based, after one of its investors, Roberto Singler, alerted local publication The Marker about the deal. We reached out to Ido Arad, one of the co-founders of the company, who referred our questions to a team at Facebook. "We acquire smaller tech companies from time to time. We don't always discuss our plans," a Facebook spokesperson said.