Chatbot
Also known as: chatbots, conversational AI
What is chatbot?
A chatbot is a conversational interface that answers questions in natural language. Modern business chatbots are usually retrieval-grounded, drawing answers from the company's own documentation rather than generating freely.
Three generations
- Decision-tree bots — fixed paths, brittle
- Intent-classifier bots — trained on utterances, expensive to maintain
- Retrieval-grounded LLM bots — answer from source content, cite it, escalate when unsure
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