---
title: "Conversational AI"
description: "Conversational AI is the family of technologies that let software hold a natural dialogue with people through text or voice. It includes chat assistants on webs"
canonical: https://aikkvnak.hu/en/glossary/conversational-ai
language: en
publisher: AI KKV-nak
updated: 2026-09-19
---

# What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is the family of technologies that let software hold a natural dialogue with people through text or voice. It includes chat assistants on websites and WhatsApp, voice agents on the phone, and the language models, speech recognition and text-to-speech that power them.

## Scripted chatbot versus LLM assistant

Older chatbots followed decision trees and failed on anything unexpected. LLM-based assistants understand intent, so a customer can ask the same thing ten different ways. The cost is that they need guardrails: a knowledge base to answer from, and rules for when to say 'I don't know'.

|  | Scripted chatbot | LLM assistant |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Understands rephrasing | No | Yes |
| Needs a knowledge base | No | Yes |
| Can take actions | Rarely | Yes, with tools |
| Risk of wrong answers | Low, but often unhelpful | Managed with guardrails |

## FAQ

**Which channels can a conversational AI run on?**

Website chat, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp Business, SMS, email and phone. The same assistant logic can serve several channels with channel-specific formatting.

Related: https://aikkvnak.hu/en/glossary/ai-voice-agent, https://aikkvnak.hu/en/glossary/llm, https://aikkvnak.hu/en/glossary/rag, https://aikkvnak.hu/en/glossary/hallucination