NLP (Natural Language Processing)
What is NLP (Natural Language Processing)?
NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the branch of AI that lets software parse, interpret, and generate human language — turning a customer's free-form text or transcribed speech into structured intent a program can act on, and turning a reply back into natural-sounding language. It's the foundational technology underneath conversational AI, sentiment analysis, and conversational support: instead of matching a fixed keyword list or menu option, an NLP pipeline understands open-ended phrasing as written or spoken.
More detail
NLP is often split into two directions: natural language understanding (NLU), which extracts intent and entities from what a person said, and natural language generation (NLG), which produces the reply — a modern LLM-based system typically handles both in one model rather than a pipeline of separate hand-tuned classifiers.
NLP isn't one single product feature — it's the shared underlying technology behind several distinct CPaaS capabilities: an AI agent's intent understanding, a chatbot's free-form question parsing, sentiment analysis's tone classification, and an IVR's natural-language menu all run on an NLP pipeline rather than each reinventing language parsing from scratch.
On Orbit, NLP runs underneath the AI agent framework and the inbox's per-conversation sentiment scoring — an LLM-based pipeline parses inbound SMS, chat, email, and transcribed voice-call text to extract intent and tone, rather than a hand-tuned keyword classifier per channel.
Frequently asked
- What's the difference between NLP and NLU?
- NLP is the broader field covering both understanding and generating human language. NLU (natural language understanding) is narrower — it's specifically the step that extracts intent and entities from what a person said, one part of a larger NLP pipeline that also includes generating the reply.
- Is NLP the same thing as conversational AI?
- No — NLP is one underlying technology that parses and generates language. Conversational AI combines NLP with dialog management and machine learning to hold a full multi-turn back-and-forth; NLP alone understands a single piece of text but doesn't by itself track conversation state across turns.
See also
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