Conversational AI

Conversational AI is software that holds a natural back-and-forth conversation in ordinary language, rather than routing a person through fixed buttons or scripted menu options.

The test is whether the system can handle a question it wasn’t given a scripted path for. A menu-driven bot breaks the moment a customer phrases something unexpectedly; conversational AI understands the intent underneath the wording — this is what natural language understanding (NLU) is doing underneath it — and can carry context from one message to the next inside the same conversation.

It shows up in this category as the layer behind a phone agent, a WhatsApp assistant, and a website chat widget alike — the same underlying conversation engine, answering through whichever channel a customer happened to use.

What it’s built from, in practice, on the assistant builder page.