An old category, transformed
A chatbot is any program you interact with through text chat. The word combines chat and robot, and it covers everything from a website contact widget to an assistant like ChatGPT.
Before and after generative AI
Most pre-generative chatbots ran on rules and scripts written in advance: if the message contains this word, return this answer. They handled expected questions and fell back on “I don’t understand” as soon as you phrased something differently — an experience most people found frustrating.
A chatbot with an LLM behind it interprets intent from context and composes an answer on the spot. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are the visible examples of this generation.
Where you meet them
- Automated support on company sites and messaging platforms
- Product guidance and order help on e-commerce sites
- Internal help desks — expense procedures, policy lookups
- Government service desks and routine public enquiries
Choosing between them
In practice, scripted bots still suit fixed questions where accuracy is paramount, while generative ones suit open-ended conversation, and many deployments combine both. Because a generative bot can produce a confident wrong answer, deployments that need authoritative responses often constrain it to the organization’s own documents using RAG.
The word itself is used very broadly, sometimes meaning the old scripted kind and sometimes the newest assistants. When reading a case study, working out which kind is meant avoids a lot of confusion.