Conversational AI

Conversational AI is the discipline covering natural language understanding (spoken or written), dialogue management, and response generation. Its current generation rests on large language models, which moved the field from rigid decision trees to understanding free-form phrasing — accents, hesitations, French mistakes, unfinished sentences.

The useful distinction for a business owner: conversational AI is the technology; the conversational agent is the product; its application to your phone is the use case. Evaluating a tool therefore means evaluating the whole chain — recognition, understanding, guardrails — not just the voice's fluidity in a demo. Fluidity is demonstrated in ten seconds; reliability is demonstrated in ten days of real calls.