Natural language processing was a buzzword in 2020 among others including chatbots, omni-channels and CRM. But what does it mean? Put simply, NLP builds machines that understand and respond to text or voice data. It’s a highly intelligent tool that enables bots to respond with text or speech of their own like human agents do.
It’s a branch of AI concerned with giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words like we can, and works by combining computational linguistics with statistical, machine learning.
But that’s not the best bit. It’s all done in real-time.
Perhaps understandably, there’s been somewhat of a NLP boom over the past few years. This was escalated during the 2020 COVID-19 breakout because a huge volume of live agents were sent to work from home allowing the businesses they worked for to operate remotely. To make this happen, organisations adopted improved AI that widely featured NLP to aid live agents. Here, we take a look at the effect of this and how NLP is working to shape the world of CX and contact centre automation.
Pandemic Frontline
AI chatbots are working on the frontlines of the patient experience in the fight against COVID-19. They’re aiding healthcare workers by filtering out patient phone calls and referring patients to relevant resources. For example, to avoid a patient being passed from one agent to another to obtain information on parking at a hospital, they will get the answer immediately from a chatbot.
More recently, AI chatbots have been working to sift through patients’ clinical needs. The chatbot might field some patient symptoms and produce recommendations for care. They’ve also been used as a COVID-19 symptom-checker.
A Boost from the Cloud
NLP has evolved as a revolutionary technology in the field of AI research throughout 2020. One reason for this is the adoption of cloud-enabled solutions to improve CX. This has, in turn, defined the NLP market and experts are now exploring ways to unleash its full potential in the coming years.