An AI assistant is an AI tool designed to help you complete tasks, such as answering questions, organising information, or carrying out simple actions on your behalf.

An AI companion is an AI chatbot designed to simulate an ongoing relationship, such as a friend, partner, or confidant, rather than to complete tasks or answer questions.

A chatbot is a computer program you talk to using normal language, usually by typing.

A context window is the amount of a conversation an AI can “see” and refer back to at once.

Generative AI is AI that creates new content, such as text, images, audio or video, rather than simply retrieving or analysing existing information.

A hallucination is when an AI chatbot gives an answer that sounds correct and confident but is actually wrong or made up.

A large language model, or LLM, is the technology behind most AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Memory is a feature in some AI tools that lets the AI remember specific facts about you from one conversation to the next.

A prompt is the instruction or question you give an AI tool to get a response.

Training data is the large collection of text, images, or other content used to teach an AI system how to respond.

The Turing test is a test of whether an AI can produce responses convincing enough that a person can’t tell if they’re talking to a computer or a human.