The Chatbot API is a stateless, cloud-based chatbot service. It can be used alone, for text-based chat, or in conjunction with the Character API to build embodied conversational agents.

The stateless design of the Chatbot API lets you introduce dialog capabilities in a "serverless" manner. Think of the API as a piece of infrastructure that converts tuples of the form (input, state) to (output, new state), where 'input' represents the user input, 'output' represents the bot output, and 'state' represents a bundle of conversation state in JSON format that gets shuttled back and forth with each subsequent input and output.

The engine for this transformation is a modern Natural Language Processing system that lets you combine syntactic and semantic rules in a powerful framework for ambiguity resolution. The rules are stored as static JSON files, and can be edited using a visual authoring tool.

You normally call the API from a server application that you manage, in order to provide storage for conversation state. This allows a chatbot to form long-term memories about each user. Because logs and conversation state are stored on your terms, you remain in complete control of the sensitive information they contain.