What is natural language understanding (NLU)?
The part of conversational AI that works out what a person means from what they say.
Natural language understanding (NLU), explained
NLU identifies the intent ("book an appointment") and details such as dates, names and numbers from free speech.
In modern voice agents, NLU is largely handled by the large language model instead of separate intent classifiers.
NLU also has to cope with how people really speak on the phone: half sentences, corrections ("Tuesday, no, Wednesday"), filler words and background noise.
See how these ideas come together in Chitti, Manolle's AI voice agent.
Related terms
- Intent recognitionWorking out what the caller wants to do, for example book, cancel, ask a price or complain.
- Large language model (LLM)An AI model trained on large amounts of text that can understand requests and generate human-like replies.
- Conversational AITechnology that lets people talk or type to software in ordinary language and get useful replies.
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