NLP Applications for Chatbots & Virtual Assistants

Chatbot

Updated at: Jan 25, 2024

5 min to read

BotPenguin AI Chatbot maker

Could someone in the past have ever imagined that they can communicate with their phone and complete tasks sitting at home? Or that a phone would respond to your queries! 

These days, thanks to Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and other voice assistants, this is a relatively common occurrence. In today's environment, we frequently communicate with virtual assistants by speaking to them directly or typing into them. 

Today there are so many people with Alexa-enabled gadgets in their homes who frequently ask them to play music or tell jokes. In 2018, Amazon alone sold over 100 million Alexa devices; throughout that year, Alexa cracked over 100 million jokes.

Furthermore, it is expected that the natural language processing (NLP) market will increase to USD 49.4 billion by 2027 at a compound annual growth rate of 25.7%

Natural Language Processing (NLP), an emerging technology that is the source of many of the current types of AI, will continue to be a major priority for today's and tomorrow's cognitive applications. NLP has made it possible for people and computers to connect naturally.

What Is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are computer programs created to converse with clients like real people. They enable  organizations to communicate with clients (or potential clients) and provide support as needed. Chatbots can:

  • Ask questions and provide pertinent visuals regarding the many available adjustments.
  • Assist clients in creating and submitting their orders by guiding them through the process.
  • Automate refund operations, schedule requests, and provide immediate resolutions.
  • Help clients by providing delivery updates.

Chatbots are clever enough to determine the conversation's context and carry out the appropriate bot flow. However, chatbots cannot solve problems or carry out a list of tasks by themselves. A virtual assistant, on the other hand, may trawl through available resources and provide support for a variety of needs.

What Is a Virtual Assistant?

The term "virtual assistant" refers to a type of online personal assistant, often referred to as an "intelligent personal assistant" or "IVA," that assists users with daily tasks, including handling email, organizing meetings, and other similar tasks. Amazon’s Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana are well-known virtual assistants.

While these virtual assistants can help you with many daily duties, they cannot handle your customer service needs independently.

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) is a computer program's capacity to comprehend natural language, or human language, as it is spoken and written. It is a part of machine intelligence (AI).

NLP has linguistic roots and has been around for more than 50 years. It has several practical uses in various industries, including corporate intelligence, search engines, and medical research.

How NLP works in a chatbot

Thanks to NLP, computers can now understand natural language like people do. Whether the language is spoken or written, artificial intelligence is used in natural language processing to take real-world information, process it, and make sense of it in a way that a computer can understand. 

Including humans, who have a variety of sensors like ears for hearing and eyes for seeing, computers have reading programs and microphones for gathering sounds. Like people use their brains, computers have programs to process the many inputs they get. Eventually, during processing, the input is converted into code that computers can read. 

The two core steps of natural language processing are 

  • Algorithm development
  • Data preparation

Data preparation is the process of preparing and "cleaning" text data. It is done so that computers can analyze it. Preprocessing highlights text properties that an algorithm can employ while preparing data for usage.

NLP Applications for Chatbots & Virtual Assistants

The genie of the virtual assistant won't be put back in the bottle. Chatbots that use NLP are here to stay, and their skills will only expand. The circumstance offers a chance to bring together stakeholders from many fields, including chatbot and platform developers, members of the medical industry, academics, regulators, and the general public, to create frameworks for their regulation.

The World Economic Forum has brought together international professionals from the healthcare, government, and corporate sectors to create Chatbot RESET. It is a framework for governing the responsible use of virtual assistants in healthcare.

Along with addressing the need for equality and accountability, this framework also addresses legal, privacy, and security concerns. Its co-creators are developing operational and ethical standards that may be applied to other sectors.

Automatic question-answering is performed by chatbots and virtual assistants, which are programmed to comprehend natural language and produce relevant responses.

While conventional question-answering systems adhere to pre-established rules, chatbots and virtual assistants powered by AI can learn from each contact and choose how to react. The best aspect is that they get better over time and learn from experience.

As they can assist teams in resolving up to 80% of all basic inquiries and direct more complex problems to human agents, these intelligent robots are becoming more common on the front lines of customer service. Chatbots and virtual assistants, accessible around the clock, can reduce response times and free agents from time-consuming and repeated questions.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) 

What software or applications employ NLP?

NLP is employed in many applications, including survey analytics, innovative home technology, translation tools, and social media monitoring.

How is NLP applied in everyday life?

Smart assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana have gained the most notoriety as the most well-known examples of NLP. They dissect language into word stems, parts of speech, and other linguistic aspects using NLP.

Which of the following describes various NLP applications in the legal field?

According to my assessment, there are five areas of legal action where NLP is becoming more prevalent: Finding information that can be used in legal research, finding the documents that are relevant to a request, for data via electronic discovery, reviewing a contract will ensure that it is thorough, and risk-free.

Is a part of artificial intelligence software capable of simulating human conversation?

A chatbot system simulates a conversation with a user through messaging services, websites, mobile apps, or the phone by utilizing conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Conclusion

Here we have discussed NLP applications for virtual assistants and chatbots. If you want to c, you must go ahead with BotPenguin; you can create your bot using drag and drop without any programming experience, view planned meetings, control availability, amend FAQs, improve logic, and more. Visit the BotPenguin website to know more. 

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Table of Contents

BotPenguin AI Chatbot maker
  • What Is a Chatbot?
  • What Is a Virtual Assistant?
  • What is natural language processing?
  • How NLP works in a chatbot
  • NLP Applications for Chatbots & Virtual Assistants
  • BotPenguin AI Chatbot maker
  • Frequently asked questions (FAQs) 
  • Conclusion