A knowledge base assistant answers only from content you give it: your website, your documents, your systems. A general chatbot answers from whatever it was trained on. The first can be checked and corrected. The second cannot.
Two things called a chatbot
The word chatbot covers two different products. The older kind follows a script: a decision tree with buttons, built by hand, that breaks the moment a visitor asks something the author did not anticipate. The newer kind is a general language model with a chat box in front of it. It will answer anything, fluently, whether or not it knows your business.
A knowledge base assistant is a third thing. It uses a language model to write, but it is only allowed to write from passages retrieved from your own content. If no passage covers the question, it says so. The model supplies the language. Your content supplies the facts.
Why the source matters more than the model
When a visitor asks a bank website about the fee for a transfer abroad, the right answer is on one page of that website. A general model has read thousands of fee tables from thousands of banks and will produce a plausible number. Plausible is the problem. A knowledge base assistant retrieves the one page that applies, and the answer carries the source.
- You can check an answer, because it points to the passage it came from.
- You can fix a wrong answer by fixing the content, not by retraining anything.
- You can see what the assistant could not answer, because a miss is a retrieval miss, which is measurable.
- You decide what it knows. Remove a document and the knowledge is gone.
What it is not good at
A knowledge base assistant is only as current as its content. If the price list on the website is a year old, the answer is a year old. It cannot look up a visitor's own account, place an order or change a booking, because it has no access to those systems and should not. For those tasks it hands over to a person, which is why the contact details on your site matter to it.
How to tell which one you are being offered
- Ask what happens when the content does not cover a question. The right answer is that the assistant says so, and the question is logged.
- Ask where an answer comes from. If there is no source, there is no way to check it.
- Ask how to correct an answer. If the fix is in the content, it is a knowledge base assistant.