Chatbot
A program that talks to people via text or voice, answering questions and performing tasks. It ranges from simple button flows to AI assistants that understand natural language.
A chatbot is a program that converses with users via text or voice, on channels such as a website, WhatsApp or messaging apps. The simplest ones follow predefined flows (menus, buttons, keywords); modern ones use LLMs to understand natural-language questions and answer based on a company knowledge base.
It is mainly used for customer support (answering FAQs, triaging requests before handing off to a human), sales and lead capture, and internal automation (HR, IT helpdesk). The big advantage is 24/7 availability and scale: a bot can handle thousands of simultaneous conversations.
When to use it: when a significant share of your business conversations is repetitive with known answers. A concrete example: an online store plugs a chatbot into its FAQ and order system; the bot answers "where is my order?" by looking up the tracking code, and only transfers to a human agent the cases it cannot resolve.