Conversational AI
Conversational AI is the family of technology that lets software understand and respond to people in natural language, by text or by voice.
It covers chatbots, voice assistants and AI voice agents. The core pieces are language understanding, a way to decide the next response or action (today usually a large language model), and, for voice, speech recognition and speech synthesis.
In business it is used for customer service, sales calls, appointment scheduling, surveys and internal help desks, often alongside people rather than instead of them.
