Chatbot
A chatbot is software that holds text conversations with people. Traditional chatbots follow fixed rules or menus; modern AI chatbots use a large language model to understand free-form questions and reply naturally.
In depth
The word 'chatbot' covers two very different things. A rule-based (or 'flow') chatbot follows a decision tree — buttons, keywords, and pre-written replies — and breaks the moment a customer phrases something it didn't expect. An AI chatbot, built on a large language model, understands intent in natural language, remembers earlier turns, pulls answers from your business knowledge, and can take actions like booking or sending a payment link. For Indian businesses the practical differences that matter are: does it handle Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and code-mixed messages like Hinglish; does it work on WhatsApp and Instagram, not just a website widget; and does it actually complete tasks (book, quote, collect) rather than just chat. A chatbot only handles text — if you also need it to answer phone calls by voice, you want a broader conversational AI or AI receptionist, of which chat is one channel.
Related terms
More terms in this category
AI Receptionist
An AI receptionist is a software system that answers inbound customer messages and phone calls using a large language model (LLM), books appointments, collects payments, and sends notifications — without human staff.
Conversational AI
Conversational AI is technology that lets computers hold natural back-and-forth conversations with humans in text or voice. It uses large language models to understand intent, remember context across turns, and generate human-like replies.
Voice AI
Voice AI is conversational AI that communicates through voice instead of text. It combines speech-to-text (STT), a large language model for understanding, and text-to-speech (TTS) to reply in a human-like voice.
See chatbot working live
Our own agent answers chat and calls at app.dvaarik.com/dvaarik-ai — or describe your business on WhatsApp and we'll show you what it looks like for you.
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