A chatbot is any software you talk to in natural language. The term covers a wide range: old-style scripted bots that match keywords and reply from a fixed menu, and modern AI assistants built on large language models that can hold open-ended conversations, write documents and answer follow-up questions in context.
Modern LLM chatbots feel dramatically more capable because they generate responses rather than picking from canned ones. That same flexibility is their weakness — they can produce confident but wrong answers (hallucinations), so they work best for drafting, brainstorming and explaining, with a human checking anything factual or high-stakes. Most AI writing tools, including the ones on this site, are essentially task-focused chatbots: you describe what you need, the model responds.
Related terms
Large Language Model (LLM) · Generative AI · Hallucination