Definition
AI systems that can hold a natural-language conversation with humans across voice or text. Used in chatbots, voice assistants, and customer service agents.
Why it matters
For an owner, the appeal is handling the same routine questions — hours, pricing, availability, directions — over and over without tying up a person for each one. The practical win is that it works across the channels customers actually use, so a text inquiry and a phone call can get the same consistent answer. The failure mode to plan for is the edge case it can't handle gracefully; a good setup knows when to hand off to a human rather than guessing, because a confidently wrong answer to a customer is worse than no answer at all.