Back in 2015, Facebook was testing its digital assistant codenamed Moneypenny. Facebook called it a new service inside Messenger that would complete tasks and look for information on your behalf. On April 6, Facebook announced the launch of suggestions from M in a blog.

As time goes by, there seems to be less and less discussion about whether technology will surprise us in the time to come. It’s just a question of how.

Technology has always been the game changer. We’ll see its implications in stranger territories in time to come. The opportunities of technology impacting our lives are endless; be it simple IoT-based or some innovative application using novel technologies.

Salesforce and IBM have agreed to partner and bring together Salesforce’s Einstein (AI that powers the world’s #1 CRM) and IBM’s Watson (the leading AI platform for business). IBM sharing its Watson AI platform with Salesforce is aimed at leveraging each company’s machine learning know-how to deliver deeper insights into customer behavior by the second half of this year, the companies said in a joint statement.

The technology, which is called Lex, bundles in speech recognition, conversational interactions and text recognition. According to Werner Vogels, the e-commerce titan’s CTO, Lex could lead to assistants and chatbots that sound friendlier and more human than their predecessors.

It can be a daunting exercise to predict the cost of developing a mobile app. Factors such as integration with back end systems, adherence to regulatory requirements etc can jack up the cost of development.