Conversational AI
What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI is technology that lets people interact with software in natural language, by voice or text, and get a useful response, as in voicebots, chatbots and virtual assistants.
A conversational AI system combines several capabilities: speech recognition (for voice), natural language understanding to work out what the person wants, dialogue management to decide what to do next, connections to business systems to get the answer or complete the task, and language generation or speech synthesis to reply.
Older chatbots followed fixed scripts and keyword rules; current systems use language models, so customers can phrase things their own way. In a contact center the measure of success is not how human the bot sounds but whether the customer’s need is resolved without a repeat contact, and whether a hand-off to an agent carries the full conversation and context so the customer never has to start again.
Related: AI & bots, Intent recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Self-service.