There are four main kinds of chatbots. All of them are artificial intelligence, but the four different kinds are designed to do different things and rely on different kinds of AI.

  • ones like Alexa and Siri, which listen to (or read) what you say, choose the skill that you asked for (such as telling you the weather, or ordering something for you) then do that. They might ask one or two questions to clarify what you want, but basically they are in the business of identifying the skill and meeting your need as quickly and efficiently as possible. They have a fixed range of skills, designed in by their programmers. If it tells you the weather, this will almost certainly be the real weather, not something made up.
  • Customer service bots that aim to take the place of a human customer service representative. These are kind of like Alexa and Siri, but the task they are doing is more complicated. You can think of them as running a script that is designed to either a) tell you what you need to know without involving a human or b) collecting information from you and passing you to a human at the end. For them, the goal is to save money for the company by handling most of the requests automatically, without involving an expensive human.
  • ones like ChatGPT that can have a longer conversation with you, and might be able to help you with more loosely defined tasks, such as writing a draft of a letter. There are no guarantees, but the range of things they might be able to do for you is not fixed. You just have to find the right way of asking. And crucially, there is no guarantee that the response will be sensible or truthful. Its programmers have arranged for it to be good at sounding convincing, but it might not be accurate.
  • Ones that are just for entertainment. They don’t particularly try to do anything, they are just designed to have a free-form conversation. You can use ChatGPT like that if you want.