There’s some chatter in the gurusphere that voice devices will replace smart phones as the primary personal electronic device. Color me skeptical but we do have this item that self-service customer care vendor Zappix has made its interactive voice response tools available on Amazon Alexa. It makes sense: Alexa already hears you curse when something doesn’t work, so she might as well offer to help.

What can Facebook and friends do to regain public trust? Banning services that sell fake followers is a good start, as Facebook-owned Instagram did not long ago. But selling ads to companies that violate the ban is an even better way to make things worse. Sure enough, TechCrunch found that’s exactly what’s been happening. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. I thought so.

Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents.  You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better.  It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange.  Price was not announced.