Natural Language Processing

Any time you can talk, or write, to a machine using natural language (i.e. not especially coded language designed to help the machine to understand) that machine is processing your natural language.

This has been part of science fiction for along time. Think of C-3PO (as opposed to R2-D2 who simply beeps) in Star Wars, and HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Real Examples of Natural Language Processing

• Chatbots.

• The computers you talk to when you ring a business.

• Alexa and Siri do understand natural language but they have only a limited set of instructions. More recent examples of NLP understand language as normally spoken by humans, not specifically coded language.

• Google translate.

• The ability to talk naturally to a computer will be used much more widely.

  • How long will it be before we do not primarily use keyboards to communicate?

  • We will talk to robots or to machines in shops to get what we want.