Glossary: chatbots and assistants
What sits behind a chatbot that answers customers well: the knowledge base, search by meaning, system instructions and the limits to set.
10 pages, in alphabetical order. The whole glossary from A to Z
What an AI chatbot is and how it differs from the old ones
A chatbot is a program that holds written conversations with people. An AI chatbot uses a language model to understand freely worded questions and answer in a natural way.
What conversational AI is and where businesses use it
Conversational AI is the set of technologies that lets software talk to people in natural language, written or spoken: understand what they ask, keep track of the conversation and reply in a relevant way, on any channel.
What is a custom GPT and when is it worth building one?
A custom GPT is a version of ChatGPT set up for one specific task, with its own instructions, reference documents and, if needed, connections to other services. You create it without programming and can share it with colleagues or with anyone who has the link.
What an embedding is and why it finds things by meaning
An embedding is a piece of text turned into a list of numbers that represents its meaning, so that texts with similar meanings get numbers that sit close together.
What a knowledge base is and why AI needs one
A knowledge base is the organised set of your company's information, such as FAQs, procedures, product sheets and terms, from which an AI assistant takes its answers, kept up to date by someone responsible for it.
What is RAG: AI that answers from your documents
RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is a technique where, before answering, the AI searches your documents for the useful passages and uses them as the basis for its answer.
What semantic search is and how it helps your business
Semantic search finds documents based on the meaning of your question, not just the exact words it contains. If you search for "how do I recover my password", it also finds the text that talks about "resetting your login credentials", because the concept is the same.
What a chatbot's system prompt is
The system prompt is the set of fixed instructions the model receives before every conversation: who it is, how it should speak, what it can and cannot do.
What a vector database is and when you really need one
A vector database is a store built to hold embeddings and quickly find the ones closest to a question, that is, the texts most similar in meaning.
What a voicebot is and when it makes sense on the phone
A voicebot is an assistant that talks on the phone or by voice: it listens, transcribes what you say, understands the request with an AI model and replies in a synthetic voice.