A chatbot is a computer program you talk to using normal language, usually by typing.
You ask it something or tell it to do something, and it replies in full sentences, much like a person would.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are all chatbots. So are the AI assistants built into apps like Snapchat and Instagram.
A chatbot doesn’t think or understand in the way a person does. It works by predicting what a good reply looks like, based on patterns it has learned from huge amounts of text. Most of the time this produces a useful, accurate answer. Occasionally it produces something that sounds confident but is wrong. That’s covered separately under “hallucination“.