Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help machines understand spoken and written human communication. NLU leverages machine learning to recognize elements of speech such as intent, sentiment and syntax.
NLU assists call centers in understanding the purpose or issue behind a customer’s call, and is an important pre-framing tool for agents looking to resolve it. By analyzing and predicting customer intent, behavior and emotions, NLU helps agents and interactive voice response (IVR) systems better understand and respond to customer issues.