What is the difference between an AI Chatbot and a rule-based chatbot?

Rule-based chatbots operate on decision trees.

If the user says X, show menu Y.

They are brittle since any phrasing not covered in the decision tree causes the bot to fail.

Televanta's AI Chatbot uses a large language model to understand intent in natural language regardless of how the question is phrased.

A visitor asking "what's your refund policy" and "can I get my money back" are understood as the same question.

This dramatically increases the range of queries handled successfully.

For example, a visitor types "do you ship to Bosnia?" A rule-based chatbot with no exact match returns "I didn't understand that." Televanta's AI Chatbot understands the delivery question, checks the configured shipping policy, and answers "Yes, we ship to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Delivery typically takes 3 to 5 business days."

Use case: A consumer electronics retailer replaces its rule-based chatbot with Televanta after finding that 60 percent of chatbot interactions ended in "I'm sorry, I didn't understand." After switching to Televanta, the unintelligible response rate drops to 4 percent and chat satisfaction scores increase by 38 points.