What Is Natural Language Understanding NLU?

diciembre 6, 2023 0 By Kira Urbaneja

What is natural language understanding NLU Defined

how does nlu work

For instance, instead of sending out a mass email, NLU can be used to tailor each email to each customer. Or, if you’re using a chatbot, NLU can be used to understand the customer’s intent and provide a more accurate response, instead of a generic one. NLU provides many benefits for businesses, including improved customer experience, better marketing, improved product development, and time savings. If you ask Alexa to set a 10-minute timer, the device will use natural language understanding to figure out the end result you are seeking and then initialize the process of setting the actual timer. Both ‘you’ and ‘I’ in the above sentences are known as stopwords and will be ignored by traditional algorithms.

how does nlu work

Most other bots out there are nothing more than a natural language interface into an app that performs one specific task, such as shopping or meeting scheduling. Interestingly, this is already so technologically challenging that humans often hide behind the scenes. In machine translation, machine learning algortihms analyze millions of pages of text to learn how to translate them into other languages. The accuracy of translation increases with the number of documents that the algorithms analyze. This is especially useful when a business is attempting to analyze customer feedback as it saves the organization an enormous amount of time and effort. It is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and focuses on converting human language into machine-readable formats.

Natural Language Understanding

Once the software achieves your desired rate of accuracy, you can implement the NLU process into your desired form of technology for consumer use. If you’re satisfied with the analysis of your results, you may wish to visualize the data in some form of chart or graph. At this point, the software how does nlu work will process the data and break it down into segments and categories that are easier for the computer to understand. The goal of a chatbot is to minimize the amount of time people need to spend interacting with computers and maximize the amount of time they spend doing other things.

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Natural language understanding can positively impact customer experience by making it easier for customers to interact with computer applications. For example, NLU can be used to create chatbots that can simulate human conversation. These chatbots can answer customer questions, provide customer support, or make recommendations.

Customer service and support

This could include analyzing emotions to understand what customers are happy or unhappy about. NLU has massive potential for customer service and brand development – it can help businesses to get an insight into what customers want and need. NLU is used in dialogue-based applications to connect the dots between conversational input and specific tasks. AI technology has become fundamental in business, whether you realize it or not. Recommendations on Spotify or Netflix, auto-correct and auto-reply, virtual assistants, and automatic email categorization, to name just a few. Using complex algorithms that rely on linguistic rules and AI machine training, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Facebook Translation have become leaders in the field of “generic” language translation.

This helps with tasks such as sentiment analysis, where the system can detect the emotional tone of a text. Overall, natural language understanding is a complex field that continues to evolve with the help of machine learning and deep learning technologies. It plays an important role in customer service and virtual assistants, allowing computers to understand text in the same way humans do.

Virtual assistants

In other words, when a customer asks a question, it will be the automated system that provides the answer, and all the agent has to do is choose which one is best. With an agent AI assistant, customer interactions are improved because agents have quick access to a docket of all past tickets and notes. This data-driven approach provides the information they need quickly, so they can quickly resolve issues – instead of searching multiple channels for answers. For example, it is difficult for call center employees to remain consistently positive with customers at all hours of the day or night.

Answering customer calls and directing them to the correct department or person is an everyday use case for NLUs. Implementing an IVR system allows businesses to handle customer queries 24/7 without hiring additional staff or paying for overtime hours. Imagine how much cost reduction can be had in the form of shorter calls and improved customer feedback as well as satisfaction levels. Botpress allows you to leverage the most advanced AI technologies, including state-of-the-art NLU systems. By using the Botpress open-source platform, you can create NLU-powered chatbots that perform ahead of the curve while costing less money and resources.

When is Natural Language Understanding Applied?

Today, it is utilised in everything from chatbots to search engines, understanding user queries quickly and outputting answers based on the questions or queries those users type. NLU chatbots allow businesses to address a wider range of user queries at a reduced operational cost. These chatbots can take the reins of customer service in areas where human agents may fall short.


how does nlu work

A sophisticated NLU solution should be able to rely on a comprehensive bank of data and analysis to help it recognize entities and the relationships between them. It should be able  to understand complex sentiment and pull out emotion, effort, intent, motive, intensity, and more easily, and make inferences and suggestions as a result. In our research, we’ve found that more than 60% of consumers think that businesses need to care more about them, and would buy more if they felt the company cared.

For businesses, it’s important to know the sentiment of their users and customers overall, and the sentiment attached to specific themes, such as areas of customer service or specific product features. NLU systems can be used to answer questions contextually, helping customers find the most relevant answers with minimum effort. It also helps voice bots figure out the intent behind the user’s speech and extract important entities from that. NLU takes the communication from the user, interprets the meaning communicated, and classifies it into the appropriate intents. It uses multiple processes, including text categorization, content analysis, and sentiment analysis which allows it to handle and understand a variety of inputs. Natural language understanding (NLU) is a branch of natural language processing that deals with extracting meaning from text and speech.

  • NLU-powered chatbots can provide instant, 24/7 customer support at every stage of the customer journey.
  • NLU researchers and developers are trying to create a software that is capable of understanding language in the same way that humans understand it.
  • In our research, we’ve found that more than 60% of consumers think that businesses need to care more about them, and would buy more if they felt the company cared.
  • Thanks to the implementation of customer service chatbots, customers no longer have to suffer through long telephone hold times to receive assistance with products and services.
  • Named entities would be divided into categories, such as people’s names, business names and geographical locations.