How does conversational AI work?
A text conversation needs two core steps: understand the message and produce a reply. Voice adds speech recognition before them and speech synthesis after, or uses a speech-to-speech model that works on audio directly.
Older systems split those steps into separate parts: natural language understanding sorted each message into an intent, and a dialogue manager picked a scripted response. Newer systems use a large language model for both, usually with instructions that set its role and tools to look things up. Google Cloud describes conversational AI as a type of AI that can simulate human conversation, made possible by natural language processing and foundation models.
A visitor on a pricing page asks, “Is there a plan for a team of five?” A scripted bot looks for a matching intent and may fall back to “Sorry, I didn’t get that.” An LLM-based agent can answer the question as asked and follow up with one of its own.
What does conversational AI need on a website?
On a website, conversational AI usually means a chat window or a voice widget. Voice suits questions people would rather explain than type, and it asks more of the system: little delay, handling interruptions and answers short enough to listen to.
People should know when they’re talking to software. Article 50(1) of the EU AI Act requires providers to design AI systems that interact directly with people so that those people are told they’re interacting with an AI system, unless that’s obvious from the context.
Where does Kawl Now fit in conversational AI?
Kawl Now is conversational AI by voice for SaaS websites. A visitor clicks the widget, types what they need, allows the microphone and talks, and a support or sales agent answers from knowledge the team has approved. There is no text chat, SMS or email channel, and no phone number for customers to call.
Before a call starts, the widget tells the visitor “You’re speaking with AI”, and the agent is told to say it’s an AI too. The agent greets callers in English, calls stop at 10 minutes and each conversation is saved as a text transcript, with no audio recorded.
During the call, the visitor can mute, read live captions or end the conversation at any time.
Common questions
What is the difference between conversational AI and generative AI?
Generative AI is any AI that produces new content, such as text, images or audio. Conversational AI is about dialogue with people. Modern conversational AI usually uses a generative model to write its replies, but conversational systems can also be fully scripted.
Is conversational AI the same as a chatbot?
A chatbot is one kind of conversational AI: the kind you type to. Conversational AI also covers voice assistants, phone voicebots and voice agents on websites, and the same language model can power several of them.