From the course: Hands-On AI: Building Your First Conversational AI Chatbot

What is conversational AI?

From the course: Hands-On AI: Building Your First Conversational AI Chatbot

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What is conversational AI?

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- [Narrator] Conversational AI is a branch of artificial intelligence focused on enabling machines to understand process and respond to human language in a natural and meaningful way. Whether through voice or text, the goal is to simulate real human conversations, making digital interactions more intuitive and engaging. At its core, conversational AI brings together several key technologies. Natural language processing, or NLP, helps machines understand the structure and meaning of human language. Machine learning allows systems to learn and improve over time from interactions. And when handling spoken dialogue, speech recognition and speech synthesis come into play to convert audio into text and vice versa. Chances are, you've already interacted with conversational AI. Think of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, or those helpful pop-up chat windows on websites and applications, often powered by conversational AI to assist with customer service. You also find it embedded in mobile apps, smart home devices, virtual call centers, and even in areas like banking, healthcare, and education. But why is conversational AI so important? First, it allows businesses to provide instant, 24/7 support, no waiting on hold or emailing back and forth. It scales communication to thousands, or even millions of users at once. And with the right design, it offers personalized responses to satisfy users' needs. One of the most popular applications of conversational AI is chatbots. Some chatbots are rule-based, which means they follow a fixed script. For example, if you type, "What are the opening hours?" The bot might look for keyword "opening hours" in a script, and respond with a pre-written answer. These bots are useful for answering common questions, but can get confused if users say something unexpected. On the other hand, AI-powered chatbots, like those using large language models, or LLMs, such as DialoGPT, are much more flexible. They've been trained on massive amounts of texts, like books, websites, and conversations, so they can understand context and generate replies that sound more like a human. Instead of following a script, these models predict the most likely and meaningful response based on the input they receive. That's it. I hope you now have a clearer understanding of what conversational AI is all about, and how it's shaping the way we interact with technology every day.

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