What is NLP?
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence focused on the interaction between computers and human language. It provides the techniques machines use to read text, understand meaning, extract structured information, and generate coherent written or spoken responses. NLP is the foundation beneath chatbots, search engines, translation services, sentiment analysis tools, and voice AI systems.
Key concepts: tokenization, intent, entities
Tokenization breaks text into units (words or subwords) that models can process. Intent classification determines what the user wants to accomplish — for example, "book," "cancel," or "inquire." Entity extraction identifies specific data points within the text, such as dates, names, phone numbers, and locations. Together, these steps transform unstructured human language into structured data that software can act on.
NLP in voice AI
In a voice AI pipeline, NLP operates on the transcript produced by speech-to-text. The language model uses NLP principles to understand the caller's request, decide on the appropriate response or tool call, and generate a reply. Modern large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Llama have dramatically advanced NLP capabilities, enabling AI agents to handle nuanced, multi-turn conversations that would have been impossible with earlier rule-based NLP approaches.
Practical NLP applications in business include automatic call summarization, sentiment analysis (detecting whether a caller is satisfied, frustrated, or neutral), keyword extraction for CRM tagging, and language detection for routing multilingual callers to the appropriate agent or voice model.