What is a chatbot?

Chatbot, explained

The term covers a wide range. At one end are decision-tree bots: buttons such as “Track my order” or “Talk to sales” that lead down fixed paths, sometimes with keyword matching for typed messages. They are predictable and cheap to run, but they break as soon as a customer phrases something the designer did not anticipate.

At the other end are AI chatbots built on large language models. They understand free-form questions, handle follow-ups and can write answers from a knowledge base. That flexibility is also the risk: without grounding in approved sources and a clear fallback, an AI chatbot can produce fluent answers that are wrong.

Many support chatbots combine both: scripted flows for high-stakes steps such as identity checks or lead forms, and AI answers for open questions. Whatever the approach, the parts customers notice most are whether the answer is right, whether the bot admits when it does not know, and how quickly they can reach a person.

A chatbot is a channel, not a strategy. It works when it is fed accurate content, measured on real outcomes and reviewed regularly.

Common mistake

How SuperBot relates

SuperBot is an AI chatbot for customer support that answers from your approved knowledge, shows a source label when matched knowledge supports the answer, and hands the chat to a human when confidence is low.

• Designing a chat widget that customers actually open
• AI chatbot evaluation checklist
• AI chatbot by platform

Frequently asked questions

Related terms

• AI customer support agentAn AI customer support agent is software that uses a large language model to answer customer questions in natural language, grounded in a business's own content, and can take bounded actions such as looking up an order, capturing a lead or handing the conversation to a human when it cannot help.
• Conversational AIConversational AI is the set of technologies that let software understand and respond to human language in a back-and-forth dialogue, by text or voice. It combines natural language understanding, dialogue management and response generation, and today is usually powered by large language models. Chatbots, voice assistants and AI support agents are applications of it.
• Live chatLive chat is a support channel where customers exchange real-time text messages with a business, usually through a widget on its website or app. Traditionally the replies came from human agents; many live chat tools now put an AI agent first and bring in a person when needed, so “live” increasingly means immediate rather than necessarily human.
• Fallback rateFallback rate is the percentage of chatbot messages or conversations where the bot could not produce a confident answer and fell back to a default response, such as “I'm not sure” or an offer to contact a person. It measures how often customers ask things the bot's knowledge or rules do not cover.
• Human handoff (escalation)Human handoff is the point where an automated system such as a chatbot passes a conversation to a person, ideally with the full conversation history and context attached. Good handoff rules trigger on low confidence, sensitive topics, explicit requests for a human or signs of frustration, and tell the customer what happens next and how long it will take.