Conversational AI
Conversational AI is the field of technology that lets computers hold natural conversations with people in text or speech. It combines language understanding, dialogue management and language generation, and powers chatbots, voice assistants and phone systems that respond to what people say rather than to fixed menu choices.
Example
A caller says "I need to change my delivery address" instead of pressing 3, and the system understands and helps.
Why it matters for a website chatbot
Large language models made conversational AI good enough for small businesses: no scripted flows to build. ChatBento is conversational AI for website text chat, answering in whatever words and language the visitor uses.
See it in practice: Multilingual visitors
Related terms
- AI chatbotAn AI chatbot is software that holds a text conversation with people and writes its replies using artificial intelligence, usually a large language model, instead of following a fixed script. It can understand questions phrased in many different ways and, when connected to a knowledge base, answer from a specific organization's own information.
- Large language model (LLM)A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language. It can answer questions, summarize, translate and write. Its general knowledge comes from training data with a cutoff date, so it needs supplied documents to answer accurately about a specific business.
- IntentIn chatbots, an intent is the goal behind a user's message, such as checking an order, asking about pricing or requesting a refund. Traditional chatbots classify each message into one of a fixed list of intents to choose a scripted reply; language-model chatbots infer intent without a predefined list.
- Omnichannel supportOmnichannel support means serving customers across several channels, such as website chat, email, phone, social media and messaging apps, with the conversation history shared between them. A customer can start on one channel and continue on another without repeating themselves, because agents see one connected record.