Conversational AI
Conversational AI is the category of AI systems designed to interact with humans in natural language, across chat, voice, email and messaging — using NLU, LLMs and tool-calling to hold multi-turn conversations that actually accomplish work.
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-powered system that has real-time spoken conversations — over a phone call, a web widget or a SIP trunk — using speech recognition, a language model and speech synthesis.
Voice AI is the umbrella term for AI systems that understand and generate human speech in real time — powering voice assistants, phone agents, voice chatbots and real-time translation.
IVR is a rigid scripted decision tree (press 1 for sales). Voice AI is a natural-language agent that understands free-form speech, uses LLM reasoning, and calls tools to take real actions.
BYOK means you bring your own API keys for the LLM, STT and TTS providers, and the voice AI platform routes usage through your accounts instead of bundling the provider costs into its own pricing.
BYON means you bring your own phone number — via a Twilio, Vobiz or Exotel account — and connect it to the voice AI platform via SIP, instead of renting a number from the platform itself.
SIP trunking is the protocol that lets a voice AI platform send and receive phone calls over the internet, connecting to the public phone network via a carrier like Twilio or Vobiz.