Conversational AI

Conversational AI refers to systems that understand and generate natural language to hold open-ended dialogue, as opposed to rule-based chatbots limited to predefined decision trees.

Conversational AI vs. scripted chatbots

A scripted chatbot matches input against a fixed set of patterns; anything outside those patterns fails or falls back to a generic message. Conversational AI, powered by a large language model, can interpret novel phrasing, follow multi-turn context, and — when combined with RAG — answer accurately from a specific knowledge base rather than generic training data.

Conversational AI in an AI agent

An AI agent uses conversational AI as its language layer, combined with the ability to call real actions (order lookups, bookings, cart updates), turning dialogue into completed tasks rather than just answers.