What is natural language processing?

The capabilities of artificial intelligence in relation to the understanding and processing of language spoken by humans are advancing rapidly at the moment. Two of the most current Artificial intelligence technologies in use commercially are machine translation and chatbots. There are already widespread commercial uses of both of these technologies and chat bots are are an area of rapid growth at the moment.

Recent advancements are making it almost impossible to distinguish between language produced by artificial intelligence and that produced by people. We are reaching the point where computers are able to speak to humans at a level where they are able to the Turing test which is when an artificial intelligence is able to fool a human into believing that they are speaking to another human.

The main area where natural language processing is being applied is as chatbots. Chatbots serve as customer service agents and helpdesk service agents. In point of fact, they can significantly augment the capabilities of human service and agents and in many cases reduce the cost of customer service and help desk operations.