Glossary
AI Assistant
An AI assistant is a conversational AI system optimised for helping individual users: answering questions, summarising content, drafting text, and guiding them through tasks in a natural, multi-turn dialogue.
General definition
AI assistants sit at the intersection of conversational AI and utility software. They are designed around user helpfulness: a person asks a question or describes a task, the assistant interprets the request, draws on its knowledge (and optionally on live retrieved data via RAG), and produces a useful response.
- Question answering over documents, knowledge bases or the web
- Text drafting, editing and summarisation
- Step-by-step guidance through processes or workflows
- Personalised recommendations based on context the user has shared
The line between an AI assistant and an AI agent is narrowing. Modern assistants increasingly call tools, execute tasks and take actions on behalf of the user. The practical difference is one of emphasis: assistants are interaction-first (the human remains in the loop) while agents are task-completion-first (the system acts more autonomously).
In the Ethora ecosystem
With the Ethora AI SDK you can embed an AI assistant directly inside your product’s chat interface. The assistant can answer questions grounded on your own knowledge base, guide users through onboarding, surface relevant content from your documentation, or hand off to a human agent when needed, all within the same messaging thread your users already use.
Ethora’s self-hosted deployment option means the assistant’s conversations and the underlying LLM inference can run entirely within your own environment. That matters for healthcare and financial services products where patient or client data must not transit third-party servers.
