AI agent and bot glossary

The terms you will see when comparing AI agents, chatbots, voice agents and robots, in plain English.

Annual billing: Paying for a full year up front, usually at a discount to the monthly price, and usually non refundable.
API: A way for software to talk to other software; an API lets developers connect the AI to their own apps and data.
BAA: A business associate agreement, the contract a HIPAA covered practice must sign with any vendor that handles patient data.
BestBots Score: Our 1 to 5 rating from five published factors: value, features, trust, ease of setup and integrations.
Concurrency: How many calls or conversations the AI can handle at the same time before new ones queue or fail.
Context window: How much text an AI model can read and remember at once, measured in tokens; bigger windows handle longer documents.
Credits: A vendor's internal currency for usage; each action, message or minute uses a set number of credits, so check the conversion before comparing prices.
CRM: Customer relationship management software, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, that stores contacts, deals and conversations.
Deliverability: How much of your email lands in the inbox instead of spam; cold email tools live or die on it.
Email warmup: Gradually sending and receiving email from a new inbox so providers trust it before you send cold campaigns.
Free trial: A limited time to use paid features without paying; some trials need a card and convert to paid automatically.
GDPR: The EU privacy law that sets rules for collecting and storing personal data about people in Europe.
Hallucination: When an AI states something false with confidence, such as a wrong price or policy.
HIPAA: The U.S. law protecting patient health information; medical and dental offices need vendors that support it and sign a BAA.
Human handoff: When the AI passes a conversation or call to a real person, ideally with a summary so the customer does not repeat themselves.
ISO 27001: An international certification for how a company manages information security.
Knowledge base: The help articles, documents and web pages an AI agent reads to answer questions accurately.
Latency: The delay between when a caller stops talking and when the AI starts answering; under about one second feels natural.
LiDAR: A spinning laser sensor that maps rooms or yards so a robot can navigate in straight, efficient lines.
LLM: A large language model, the AI engine (such as GPT, Claude or Gemini) that understands and writes text.
MCP: Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants plug into outside tools and data sources.
No code: Built with visual menus and drag and drop instead of programming.
Overage: The rate you pay for usage above what your monthly plan includes.
Per minute pricing: Voice tools bill for every minute the AI is on a call, usually rounded up to the next second or minute.
Per resolution pricing: You pay only when the AI fully answers a customer's question without handing it to a person, instead of paying per seat or per message.
RAG: Retrieval augmented generation: the AI looks up your own documents before answering, which cuts down on made up answers.
RTK: Real time kinematic GPS, which gives robot mowers centimeter level positioning without a buried boundary wire.
SDR: Sales development representative, the person (or now AI) who prospects, sends first emails and books meetings for closers.
Seat: One named person's license; seat pricing multiplies the plan price by your headcount.
Self empty dock: A base station that sucks dirt out of the robot's bin into a bag, so you empty it every few weeks instead of every run.
Self hosting: Running the software on your own servers instead of the vendor's cloud, which gives you control of data and cost.
SOC 2: An independent audit showing a company has controls for security, availability and confidentiality; Type II means the controls were tested over months.
Speech to text: Technology that turns spoken words into text so the AI can understand a caller or a meeting.
Suction (Pa): Robot vacuum suction power, measured in pascals (Pa); higher numbers pull more from carpet, though brush design matters too.
Telephony: The phone network side of a voice agent: phone numbers, carriers and per minute call charges, often billed separately.
Text to speech: Technology that turns the AI's written reply into a spoken voice.
Tokens: Chunks of text, roughly three quarters of a word each, that AI models count to measure input, output and price.
White label: A product you can rebrand as your own, common for agencies reselling AI tools to clients.