Natural Language Processing

NLP (Natural Language Processing) began as a system of decision trees, breaking apart sentences to try and decipher what was intended in the written word. It started back in the 1950’s, and is the basis for the Turing Test, a test in which a human tries to decide if they are speaking to another human or a machine.

NLPs foundations are in machine leaning and artificial intelligence. In the last decade NLP technology has expanded to the point of commoditization at the basic level. For example, it is not hard to find an off the shelf chat bot service or automatic email reply service.

NLP Applications

A common application is automated customer engagements.  For example, NLP can be applied for an inbound email of a customer for a travel agency. It would break down the email to look for the customer’s intent. For instance, if an email that came in said something like:

“Hello, My wife and I are interested in taking a trip to Cancun in February of next year. What kind of options do you have? You can reach me at 222-867-5309. Thank you, Jake (Last Name).”

An engine would read that email. Determine that “My wife and I” represented two people, “Cancun” combined with “trip to” was a destination, and February was the timeframe. Through regular expressions we would know that 222-867-5309 was a phone number.

The travel agency’s system would take the email address, the name on the email address and the phone number and automatically create a customer record in the CRM.

IT would evaluate the IP address from the email to try and deduce the trip origin point and then present options back to the customer in near real time of three or four options, all ranging from first-class round-trip plane tickets to three-star hotels and resorts.

A personalized response message, so it seemed more real, could be generated, and by interfacing with the CRM and imbedding pixel tracking, the company would know open rates, how quickly it was opened, frequency of opens, if it was forwarded, and obviously if it was responded to. This would allow  to score our customers, to measure true intent to purchase. These scores drove marketing budgets and digital ad spend. 

NLP Consulting Services

NLP is growing each and every year. With the deep machine learning algorithms of today, there is no indication that this type of technology is going to slow down. There are great options around NLP, in every technology stack available.

AWS and Azure have services available that you can leverage in your business. Libraries exist in every programming language. There are very creative things you can do with this type of technology to help in automating your business and customer interactions.

At TechCXO, our Product and Technology team has worked extensively with this technology and are very familiar with it. We can schedule a free consultation at anytime to discuss your ideas around NLP and how it may benefit your business or product offering. Many times and existing SaaS or PaaS company could greatly benefit from a new product offering as an upsell to your existing platform and/or service. Feel free to reach out to us, and we can help you decipher how and if this technology could benefit you.