Core concepts
Conversational AI
AI systems designed for natural back-and-forth dialogue with users — covering chatbots, voice assistants, and AI agents.
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In plain English
Conversational AI is the broad category of AI that interacts with people through natural-language conversation, by text or voice. It includes chatbots, voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, customer-support bots, and modern AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude.
Key building blocks:
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU) — parse what the user said
- Dialogue management — track context and decide what to do
- Natural Language Generation (NLG) — produce a response
- Voice (optional) — speech-to-text + text-to-speech for voice interfaces
Why it matters now: LLMs collapsed all four of those steps into a single model that just works. The result: conversational AI is finally good enough for production use across customer support, sales, healthcare, and education.
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Related terms
Chatbot
A program that simulates conversation with users — increasingly powered by LLMs to handle natural-language questions and tasks.
AI Assistant
A conversational AI tool that helps users with tasks like writing, scheduling, research, or answering questions in natural language.
LLM
Large Language Model — the type of AI behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude, trained to understand and generate text.
Text-to-Speech
AI that converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio — used for narration, accessibility, voice assistants, and content creation.
Speech-to-Text
AI that converts spoken audio into written text — the technology behind voice assistants, transcription tools, and meeting recorders.
Back to glossaryLast reviewed May 2026