Encyclopedia
Generative AI
What generative AI is, how it differs from traditional AI, and where it is used in customer contact.
Generative AI is a category of artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio or code, from a prompt, rather than only classifying or predicting from existing data.
How it differs from traditional AI
Traditional (or discriminative) AI classifies and predicts: is this email spam, will this customer churn. Generative AI produces something new: a written answer, an image, a spoken reply. Large language models are the text form of generative AI and the basis of modern chatbots and agents.
Common types
- Text: large language models that write and answer.
- Image: models that generate pictures from a description.
- Audio and voice: models that synthesise natural-sounding speech.
- Code: models that write and complete software.
Generative AI in customer contact
In customer contact, generative AI writes answers to customer questions, drafts replies for agents, and produces the synthetic voice an AI phone agent speaks with. Grounded in a business's knowledge, it moves from generic text to accurate, on-brand responses.
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