Natural Language Processing (NLP)
What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is AI-powered technology that helps computers and machines better understand and decipher the human language. In the contact center, it underpins chatbots, intent detection, transcript analysis and sentiment scoring. In the contact center, it underpins chatbots, intent detection, transcript analysis and sentiment scoring.
Natural language processing is the field of AI concerned with understanding and generating human language, written or spoken. It covers tasks such as identifying intent, extracting details like names and account numbers, detecting sentiment, summarizing text and translating between languages. Modern NLP is largely powered by language models, from small specialized models to large general-purpose ones.
In the contact center, NLP lets self-service understand customers in their own words instead of forcing menu choices, and it helps route contacts to the right place. It also powers analysis of transcripts and messages at scale, revealing why customers make contact. Accuracy is usually measured per task, for example how often intents are recognized correctly, and should be checked regularly against real customer language.
Related: Intent recognition, Conversational AI, Speech-to-text and text-to-speech, UWXP.