Conversational AI

What it is

Conversational AI is the category name used in enterprise procurement and analyst reports for systems that understand and generate natural language in a dialogue. It covers text chatbots, messaging bots, in-app assistants and voice agents. Older platforms were built on intents and hand-written flows; newer ones put a large language model at the centre and constrain it with prompts, tools and guardrails.

Voice is the hardest channel in the category. A chat user tolerates a two-second pause; a caller does not. Interruptions, background noise, accents and telephone audio quality all have to be handled in real time.

Why it matters when buying

The vocabulary trap is real. An RFP titled "conversational AI platform" will attract vendors whose strength is chat, with voice as a checkbox. A vendor's chat metrics (resolution rate, CSAT) do not transfer to voice, where latency and turn-taking dominate the caller experience. If voice is the job, evaluate voice: run a phone call, not a text demo.

What to ask

Ask what share of the vendor's live production traffic is voice. Ask whether the voice pipeline is the vendor's own or licensed, and who is on the hook when it fails. Ask for voice-specific evidence: latency percentiles, barge-in behaviour, accent coverage in your markets. Ask whether the same conversation design can be reused for chat, or whether voice is a separate build.