Conversational AI Concepts, Plainly Defined
A compact reference for the terms buyers and engineering teams run into when planning production chatbots, virtual assistants and support automation.
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing is the branch of artificial intelligence focused on enabling software systems to read, parse, interpret, transform, and generate human language in structured and unstructured formats.
NLUNatural Language Understanding
Natural language understanding is a specialized subfield of NLP focused on machine comprehension, inferring user intent, context, and underlying meaning from human text or speech.
ConceptIntent Recognition
Intent recognition is the computational task of identifying the specific goal, objective, or action a user intends to achieve from their text or spoken message.
ConceptDialogue Management
Dialogue management is the control layer of a conversational system that tracks conversation state, resolves slot requirements, and determines the optimal next action.
ConceptSentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the process of classifying the emotional tone and polarity of text or speech, categorizing inputs into positive, neutral, negative, or urgent states.
RAGRetrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieval-augmented generation is an architecture pattern where an AI engine retrieves relevant document passages from external databases before generating a response.
ConceptAgentic AI
Agentic AI describes autonomous software systems that can decompose complex goals into multi-step execution plans, select and invoke external tools, evaluate intermediate outputs, and iterate toward a goal.
Building a chatbot cluster into a real product?
Start with the conversational AI development pillar, then use these glossary pages to align business, support and engineering vocabulary.