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Purpose This paper attempts to provide significant information on the increased growth of literature of chatbots and virtual assistants. Technological changes are dynamic and keep changing at regular intervals. Therefore, it becomes highly crucial to review the performance of chatbots and virtual assistants. This paper aims to review the literature by eminent researchers in the form of authors, keywords and major contributing organizations. Design/methodology/approach Systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis is used to analyze the growth of literature on chatbots. A sum of articles has been extracted from Scopus database with selected keywords and with certain filters. VOSviewer software is used for analysis of data. A total of 130 documents are extracted from Scopus database from 2017 to 2021 (31st August). Findings This study provides a significant contribution to an existing literature and provides the understanding of research in the area of chatbots and virtual assistants. The authors with maximum number of citations are Yan, Zaho, Bengio, Weizenbaum, Song, Zhou and Maedche with jointly 180 citations. Research is been contributed by different countries where the United States is the country with highest number of documents published. The United States contributes 17% of the total production in the area of chatbots and virtual assistants. The analysis shows that the area is gaining momentum as contribution in this area is been increasing in last few years. Research limitations/implications The study shows that several branches of chatbots are also in mainstream like natural language processing, e-learning, behavioural research, conversational agents, virtual assistants, human–computer interaction, natural language and so on. It provides a wider scope to authors and researchers to gain useful insights. The bibliometric study will provide a broader spectrum in this area. Social implications The developments in technology and also the effect of COVID-19 pandemic is boosting the adoption of technology in different sectors. Deployment of technology will uplift the economy and social infrastructure. Society can avail different services from their comfort area and also in real time. This will help in reducing wastage of resources like people visiting offices for routine jobs which can be easily availed from their workplace. Society may access better services without much human interaction. Originality/value This paper adds significant contribution to the existing literature by analysing the published papers from Scopus database. The study contains new and significant information as this study covers all industries where chatbots and virtual assistants are being applied whereas in previous literature only specific industry has been taken into consideration.