Glossary
What is Chatbot?
A chat window on your site or in your messages that answers questions automatically. Modern ones are powered by an LLM and trained on your own information.
Also written as chat bot, chat widget.
Old chatbots followed a script of buttons and canned answers, which is why people learned to hate them. Today’s chatbots run on an LLM, read your own content (services, prices, policies, hours) and answer in natural language, any time of day.
What a good one does for a small business
- Answers the same ten questions your team answers every day.
- Captures the visitor’s name and number before they leave.
- Books the appointment or hands the conversation to a person when it should.
What separates a useful one from an annoying one
It is trained on your real information, it knows when to stop and pass to a human, and it never invents a price or a promise. When it can also take actions, such as booking or updating the CRM, it becomes an AI agent.
