Chatbot
Last Updated: July 29, 2026 | By Mihail Sebastian | AI Dictionary
A software program that conducts conversations with users through text or voice, from scripted website widgets to assistants built on large language models.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a software program that conducts conversations with users through text or voice. The label covers a wide range: the scripted FAQ widget in the corner of a retailer’s website is a chatbot, and so is an assistant built on a large language model.
The word names the product you talk to. The technology that lets machines converse is called conversational AI, and the simplest chatbots use none of it.
Types of Chatbots
- Rule-based chatbots follow scripts. They match keywords or button clicks to canned answers, which makes them cheap and predictable but useless one step outside the script.
- AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing to interpret free-form questions and compose answers, so they handle phrasings their designers never wrote down.
- Hybrid chatbots run scripted flows for routine transactions and pass anything unexpected to an AI layer or a human agent.
Chatbot vs Conversational AI
The practical difference: a chatbot is a thing you deploy, while conversational AI is the technology that makes machines converse. Confusing the two leads to real procurement mistakes – a vendor selling “conversational AI” may be selling a keyword-matching script.
| Chatbot | Conversational AI | |
|---|---|---|
| What it names | A specific application you talk to | A field of technology |
| Scope | One product with one job (support, booking, FAQs) | Chatbots, voice assistants, LLM-based assistants |
| AI required | No; the simplest run entirely on scripts | Yes; language understanding is the point |
| Example | An airline’s baggage-tracking widget | The speech and language stack behind Siri |
Example of a Chatbot
A passenger types “where is my bag?” into an airline’s support widget. The bot matches the question to its baggage intent, asks for the booking reference, queries the baggage system, and replies with the bag’s last scanned location. The whole exchange takes seconds and involves no human.
Then the passenger asks about compensation for a ruined suit. That question carries legal weight and has no script, so the bot hands the conversation to a human agent. Deciding what to answer and what to escalate is most of chatbot design.
Related AI terms: Conversational AI · Bot · AI Agent · Natural Language Processing
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Mihail Sebastian — Writes about AI governance, regulation, and the technology behind them. Placeholder bio — replace with a real credential line. About