What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI is technology that lets computers understand, process and respond to human language in text or speech, holding a back-and-forth conversation. It combines natural language understanding, dialogue management, language generation and, for voice, speech recognition and synthesis, and powers chatbots, voice assistants and AI agents.
Components
| Component | Role |
|---|---|
| Speech recognition | Voice to text |
| Natural language understanding | Intent and details |
| Dialogue management | Context and next step |
| Language generation | Writes the reply |
| Text-to-speech | Speaks the reply |
Examples
Customer support chat, voice AI on phone lines, virtual assistants, banking assistants, and internal help desks in Slack or Teams.
Conversational AI vs chatbot
A chatbot is one product. Conversational AI is the technology; a rule-based chatbot doesn't use it, while an AI chatbot does.
