What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is any program designed for back-and-forth conversation. Older chatbots follow scripts: they recognize keywords or offer buttons, then give pre-written answers from a decision tree. Newer chatbots use large language models, so they can understand questions phrased in many different ways and write answers on the fly. Some combine both approaches, using scripts for fixed processes and AI for open questions.

A common use is customer support. A chatbot on a company's website can answer questions about opening hours, delivery, and returns, look up an order's status when connected to the order system, and pass the conversation to a human agent when the question is complex or the customer asks for a person. Inside companies, chatbots also answer staff questions about IT, HR, and internal policies.

AI chatbots can give wrong answers with confidence, so a business chatbot should be limited to approved information, typically through retrieval-augmented generation over the company's own documents, and it should make handing over to a human easy. It also helps to tell people they are talking to a bot, and to review conversation logs for questions it answered badly.

The terms overlap. General assistants such as ChatGPT are chatbots in the broad sense, although they are usually called AI assistants. The label chatbot more often describes a narrower bot built for one organization and one purpose, such as answering support questions or taking bookings on a website.

An example

A chatbot on a utility company's website answers billing questions and hands complex cases to a human agent with the conversation history attached.