Natural Language Processing: How this innovative technology is mimicking human level of intelligence in understanding human languages

Tracing back to the early stage of human race where only hand gestures were used to communicate, we have come a long way where we now interact with computers, almost every day. Thanks to the significant rise of AI and ML technologies that help facilitate a seamless interaction between a human being and a machine.

NLP is a type of Artificial Intelligence that provides machines the capability of reading, understanding and interpreting the meaning from human languages. For instance, Amazon’s Alexa understands what we say and knows how to respond. Interestingly, Gartner predicts that 30% of our interactions with technology would be through “conversations” with smart machines.

By implementing NLP, businesses can organize their large amounts of unstructured data, like emails, social media conversations, online chat conversations, etc. to gain insights and take valuable business decisions.

A few of the common NLP applications that we use in our daily life:

o Sentiment Analysis

o Chatbots

o Virtual Assistants

o Auto correct

o Speech recognition

o Text analysis

o Intent classification

o Market Intelligence

Let’s dive deep into AI chatbots, one of the most commonly used NLP applications.

NLP in chatbots

AI-powered chatbots is still a hot topic in today’s competitive world. It is estimated that the global chatbot market is expected to reach 1.25 billion dollars by 2025, Adding to that, the race for digital transformation after the pandemic has already caused a surge.

With the potential to provide exceptional customer service, enhance engagement, achieve growth and increase sales, brands across all the industries find chatbots imperative to their business. According to an IBM study, 52% customers have hung up on customer support lines just because they didn’t want to wait for an agent. At the same time, it’s frustrating even for live agents to handle irate customers and solve repetitive problems all day long. But AI-powered bots can handle nearly 80% of routine or the Tier I question smartly.

Apart from customer service, chatbots are useful for HR and IT service desks in streamlining and automating workflows so that agents can save time to focus on much higher complex tasks.

Why your chatbot needs NLP

Imagine on a website who likes to click answers from a boring, defined set of menu options? We like to express our concerns, our thoughts or what we want to say. Instead, think how interesting would that be if you were to converse with a bot that identifies your sentiment, reacts to it with emojis, and chats with you in a very casual tone just like how your friend does.

Won’t that be engaging and informative than the traditional conversation with a limited set of menus and options. So, this is where NLP comes in.

For a chatbot to naturally converse, it needs the context awareness capability which is gained through NLP. Every person’s written expression varies in different ways with respect to language, dialect, tone, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. NLP chatbots can very well understand the user’s language, their outlook whether its positive, negative or neutral to give an appropriate response. Over a significant period of time, as they interact with hundreds of customers, handle thousands of queries, they automatically generate the best novel responses.

How NLP works in chatbot?

NLP is at the core of chatbot architecture without which they add no value. When you type “Hi”, the bot recognizes it as a standard greeting and leverages the AI capability to give a response. It understands the user’s message, parses and converts it into structured data that computers can interpret. A message is not treated as a set of symbols but the hierarchical structure of language – words, phrases, sentences and coherent ideas is analysed.

Final thoughts

NLP has changed the way we interact with computers and it will continue do so in the years to come. For businesses, NLP will continue to be more effective in providing customers a better, engaging and personalized experience.

Let’s understand how NLP can add more human touch to your chatbot. Get the ebook now! https://bit.ly/3bURb5b