Chatbot
A chatbot is a program you talk to in a conversation, by text or voice. Older chatbots followed scripts; today's AI chatbots generate answers with a large language model, so they can handle almost any question — and can be wrong.
In one line, for a 12-year-old
A chatbot is a computer you can text with that texts back.
An example
The help bubble on an airline's website that answers baggage questions.
Why it matters to people
You have a right to know when you're talking to a machine, and a business is generally responsible for what its chatbot tells you. A Canadian tribunal held an airline to its chatbot's wrong refund advice in 2024.