Chatbot
Qué es Chatbot?
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A chatbot is a software program that holds a conversation with a person over a text or voice channel, answering questions or completing tasks without a human in every exchange. Chatbots can follow fixed rules and decision trees, use natural-language understanding to match a message to an intent, or run on large language models that reason over each turn of the conversation.
More detail
Rule-based chatbots match keywords and route through a scripted decision tree — predictable, but they break down outside the scripted path. LLM-based chatbots read the conversation as it unfolds and compose a reply from context and connected data, so they handle wording and topics the builders never anticipated.
Chatbots run on any text-capable channel: a website chat widget, WhatsApp, SMS, RCS, or Facebook Messenger. A chatbot with speech recognition and synthesis layered on top becomes a voice agent, answering calls instead of messages.
What separates a chatbot from an AI agent is tool use. A chatbot answers from its training and the conversation; an AI agent can call external systems — look up an order, book a callback, check a delivery status — and fold the result into the conversation, turning answers into actions.
Deployment quality depends on integration: a chatbot disconnected from customer records, order data, and knowledge bases can only guess. Connected to those systems and given a clean handoff path to a human agent, it carries a full conversation instead of a scripted loop.
Preguntas frecuentes
- How does a chatbot work?
- A chatbot reads each incoming message, decides what the person wants (an intent), and composes a reply. Rule-based chatbots match the message to scripted responses; LLM-based chatbots pass the conversation to a language model that generates the reply, optionally grounded in company data and knowledge sources.
- What is the difference between a chatbot and conversational AI?
- Conversational AI is the underlying capability — natural-language understanding, context tracking, and generation across channels. A chatbot is the product shape that capability takes at a conversational endpoint. Every modern chatbot runs on conversational AI; conversational AI also powers voice agents and agent-assist tools that are not chatbots.
- Can a chatbot handle phone calls?
- Only indirectly — a chatbot works on text channels. Handling a phone call needs speech recognition to turn the caller's voice into text and speech synthesis to reply aloud. That combined system is a voice agent.
- When should a conversation go to a human instead?
- The strong pattern is routing, not replacement: a chatbot handles routine questions instantly and hands off to a human when confidence is low, the person asks for an agent, or the case involves money, complaints, or exceptions — passing the conversation context so the customer never repeats themselves.
See also
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