Why is NLP useful in your chatbot?

NLP allows you to make your chatbot more robust by providing the ability to understand free text responses from visitors. For example, if your website visitor types the words, “What is the price?”, “Please provide the price”, or “Tell me the price” the chatbot will understand that this person needs information about the price for your products and services and respond accordingly with the requested information. This process works because you “train” your bot to understand what those phrases expressed in natural language mean.

To introduce NLP processing into your bot, you will need:

• Capture user inquiries expressed in natural language in your bot
• An algorithm that can be trained to understand the question and provide the correct answer
• A way to connect that algorithm with your bot for answering users in real-time

NLP platforms provide the algorithm to be trained for responding in correspondence to specific goals.
But you don’t need to create your proprietary NLP platform. Some resources allow non-technical people to leverage NLP developed by some of the most sophisticated companies in the world: Google, Facebook, and Amazon. These platforms offer huge data sets for training and also support Machine Learning which is essentially a feedback loop system that allows the NLP algorithm to notice patterns and better understand how to interpret the language and inputs it is fed, getting smarter over time.