NLP (Natural Language Processing)

NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the area of AI that teaches computers to understand, analyse, and generate human language. It is the basis for a customer message to be read, answered, or routed to the right place by machine.

What is NLP?

NLP stands for “Natural Language Processing,” the machine processing of natural language. It covers everything needed for a computer to treat written or spoken language not just as a string of characters, but to process its content: break text down, grasp meaning, detect mood, translate, or phrase an answer.

NLP is the roof under which many AI tasks in customer service come together, from sentiment analysis to answer generation by a Large Language Model.

NLP and NLU: the difference

The two terms are easy to confuse. NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is a subfield of NLP and deals specifically with understanding, that is, recognising the intent behind a message. NLP is broader and additionally covers processing and generating language. In short: every NLU is NLP, but not every NLP task is NLU.

An example from practice

A pharmacy receives the WhatsApp message: “Is medication XY still in stock and can I pick it up today?” NLP breaks the message down, recognises two requests (availability and pickup), maps them to the right category, and provides the basis for a fitting automatic answer.

NLP at SendSeven

SendSeven is a unified messaging platform for WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, Instagram, Messenger, email, live chat, and browser push. NLP technology makes sure customer messages are understood, answered automatically, and assigned correctly across all channels. The AI assistant bases its answers on your knowledge base; a confidence score handles the handoff to a team member when needed. The AI support bot guide shows how to set up the AI assistant. In line with GDPR, Made in Germany. Try it free for 14 days.