If you’re considering an upgrade to your phone self-service, chances are you’re looking for the facts about “natural language.” It’s become one of those industry buzzwords, much like “cloud computing,” which vaguely refers to many related technologies. There’s a misconception that natural language technology—or its cousins, natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU)—enables a caller to say almost anything to a speech recognition system. With all the confusion surrounding natural language, many don’t realize how it helps their self-service system. The truth is that natural language technology can involve one of several approaches, each effective for different tasks.
In this first post, I’ll explain why natural language is such a big deal for speech-enabled automated phone service systems.
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