Chatbot

A chatbot is any software that engages in conversation with humans, typically through text or voice. The simplest chatbots are rule-based: they match user input to predefined patterns or keywords and respond with scripted answers. These work well for narrow, predictable use cases like FAQ bots or appointment scheduling. More sophisticated chatbots use NLP to understand intent and extract entities from user messages, enabling flexible handling of varied phrasings for the same request — platforms like Dialogflow and Rasa represent this intermediate category.

The advent of Large Language Models has transformed chatbot capabilities. LLM-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can engage in open-ended conversation on virtually any topic, understand nuanced context, remember conversation history within their context window, follow complex instructions, and generate responses that are difficult to distinguish from human writing. This has shifted the chatbot paradigm from 'rigid scripts with limited coverage' to 'flexible, general-purpose conversation with the challenge of maintaining accuracy and safety.'

Despite their conversational fluency, chatbots have important limitations and design considerations. They can hallucinate information, misunderstand intent, or fail to escalate to human agents when needed. Effective chatbot design requires clear scope definition, robust fallback strategies, human escalation paths, and continuous monitoring of conversation quality. Ethical considerations include transparency (users should know they are talking to a bot), data privacy, and the risk of over-reliance on AI for sensitive domains like healthcare or mental health support.