chatbot

A chatbot is a program you talk to in ordinary language, as if messaging a person. You type a question or request, it replies, and the exchange continues. Older chatbots followed rigid scripts and broke the moment you said something unexpected. LLM-based chatbots are different: because they generate text freely, they can hold an open-ended conversation about almost anything.

Under the hood, a chatbot wraps a language model in a loop. Each time you send a message, the whole conversation so far is handed to the model as context, and the model predicts a fitting reply. A hidden system prompt usually sets its persona and rules. The bot has no real memory beyond the text it is shown on each turn.