INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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
Their jobs at the social network started this month, meaning this acquisition closed in recent weeks
(Several others indicate that they are still at Servicefriend, meaning they too may have likely made the move as well.)Although Facebook
and more.It remains to be seen just how much people will trust Facebook as a provider of all these
In one Messenger bot that Servicefriend built for Globe Telecom in the Philippines, it noted that the hybrid bot was able to bring the
The company launched a personal assistant called M in 2015, and then bots that let users talk to businesses in 2016 on Messenger, with quite
some fanfare, although the reality was that nothing really worked as well as promised, and in some cases worked significantly worse than
whatever services they aimed to replace.While AI-based assistants such as Alexa have become synonymous with how a computer can carry on a
conversation and provide information to humans, the consensus around bots these days is that the most workable way forward is to build
services that complement, rather than completely replace, teams.For Facebook, getting its customer service on Calibra right can help it
build and expand its credibility (note: another area where Servicefriend has build services is in using customer service as a marketing
Getting it wrong could mean issues not just with customers, but with partners and possibly regulators.
