This guide lists terms that are important to understand, but are not necessarily associated with any resource.
Active
At any given moment during a conversation, one of the following is true:
- One and only one playbook is active .
- One and only one page and the associated flow are active .
Agent, human agent, live agent, virtual agent, bot, and chat bot
In this documentation, without context, agent refers to the virtual agent. When it is important to provide a distinction, a contact center may have both human agents (also called live agents ) and virtual agents .
Virtual agent , bot , and chat bot are synonymous, however, chat bot may imply a text-only interface in some contexts.
Audio input, speech recognition, and speech-to-text
End-user input as an audio file or streamed audio sent at runtime to the agent API. Audio containing speech is transcribed by speech recognition ( speech-to-text ) and the transcripts are processed.
Audio output, speech synthesis, and text-to-speech
Agent output as an audio file or streamed audio sent at runtime to the agent's client. Agent text responses use speech synthesis ( text-to-speech ) to convert text to audio.
Back-end and front-end
Back-end is the part of your system that is responsible for business logic. This is in contrast with the front-end , which provides a user interface.
Contact center
Software that allows companies to automate communication between their customers (referred to as end-users) and human or virtual agents.
Contact center operator
A person operating a contact center by using a contact center software solution.
Conversation and session
End-user interaction with a virtual or human agent. Conversation is synonymous with session .
Conversation turn, end-user input, and user query
A conversation turn is one interaction between an end-user and the virtual agent. The end-user provides an input (also called user query) and the agent provides a response.
Runtime and design-time
When using the console or API to build an agent, this is a design-time activity. When the agent is in a conversation with an end-user, this is a runtime activity.
User, end-user, and developer user
There are two types of users:
- End-users : People who have conversations with the agent.
- Developer users : Developers who build agents.
In this documentation, without context, user and end-user are equivalent.
