Conversational AI
Conversational AI is the category of AI that interacts with humans in natural language across chat, voice, email and messaging — using NLU, LLMs and tools.
Conversational AI is the category of AI that enables machines to hold natural-language conversations with humans. It spans voice AI, chatbots, WhatsApp agents, email autoresponders and in-app assistants. Modern conversational AI is LLM-powered — it understands intent, maintains context across turns, calls tools to take real actions, and can run across chat, voice and messaging channels from a single agent definition.
Conversational AI vs chatbots
Traditional chatbots followed scripted decision trees. Modern conversational AI uses LLMs to understand any input, ground answers in retrieved knowledge (RAG), and call tools — they actually take actions rather than just explain things.
Channels
Conversational AI runs on web chat widgets, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, email, phone calls, and SMS. A well-designed conversational AI platform lets one agent definition power all of these without duplication.
India adoption
India is one of the fastest-growing conversational AI markets globally, driven by WhatsApp-first consumer behavior and the need for multilingual customer engagement across 22 scheduled languages.
More definitions
A voice AI agent is an AI system that holds real-time spoken conversations via phone, web or SIP — combining speech recognition, an LLM and speech synthesis.
Voice AI is the umbrella term for AI that understands and generates human speech in real time — powering voice assistants, phone agents and translation.
IVR is a rigid scripted tree (press 1 for sales). Voice AI is a natural-language agent that understands free-form speech, reasons and calls tools.
BYOK lets you bring your own LLM, STT and TTS API keys — the voice AI platform routes usage through your accounts instead of bundling provider costs.
BYON lets you bring your own phone number — via Twilio, Vobiz or Exotel — and connect it to the voice AI platform via SIP instead of renting one.
SIP trunking lets a voice AI platform send and receive phone calls over the internet, connecting to the PSTN via a carrier like Twilio or Vobiz.