How to use NLP solutions in your business

When they hear about natural language processing (NLP), many people almost instantly think about smart assistants, such as Alexa or Siri. You have to know, though, that NLP is a much wider, more extensive section of AI. And today, we’re going to prove it. We’re going to show you how you can use diverse NLP solutions in your business. Let’s get right to it!

Natural language processing (NLP) on artificial intelligence topic, with several technology that are in AI

For the sake of this article, we’ve gathered five significant NLP applications that are used in thousands of companies and organizations across the globe. And since we’ve already mentioned smart assistants, let’s start with them.

Chatbots and voicebots

When it comes to NLP, chatbots and voicebots are apparent. Both these solutions extensively use natural language processing in order to analyze customer queries, form useful answers, and send them to the customer. It all happens automatically, within a fraction of a second. However, at this point, we have to emphasize that voicebots are far more advanced than chatbots. With voicebots, you need two primary technologies: ASR (automated speech recognition) and TTS (text to speech, it’s a system that converts text into speech). With these two features, voicebots can understand your customers and respond to their commands. Chatbots don’t need these technologies.

How can you use chatbots and voicebots? To improve customer service, obviously. Thanks to these advanced conversational AI tools, you can automate the majority of communication with customers, offer 24/7 service, and immediately answer the most frequently asked questions. That’s why modern customers value smart assistants and willingly engage in conversations with them.

Search engine results

Many online companies provide users with search engines on their websites. This solution is common, for example, in the e-commerce world. Today, search engines are more and more advanced and use such technologies as voice search and image search. Concerning the first type, natural language processing is indispensable. Search engines (including all the big ones, like Google and Bing) use NLP algorithms to understand users’ needs better. This way, your customers can find the information or product they’re looking for faster. Thanks to NLP, we can even talk about something called semantic search. It’s a solution that facilitates the searching process. For instance, when the user makes a typo in their search and types in “red shurt” instead of “red shirt”, the e-commerce search engine should still show them red shirts.

How can you use NLP in your business? Implement NLP-based algorithms in order to streamline the searching process in your company. Make sure your users get what they were looking for, even if they can’t describe their query precisely. This way, you will lower the customer churn index (e-commerce stores with smart search engines have, as a rule of thumb, lower cart abandonment rates) and improve overall user experience (UX).

Text classification and extraction

NLP comes in handy also when it comes to back-office processes. Consider text classification. With this NLP-based application, you can easily facilitate and even automate understanding, processing, and categorization of unstructured text. Moreover, advanced NLP models will allow you to organize data using predetermined tags. How can this be used in your business? In general, organized and structured data is necessary concerning business intelligence purposes, but text classification comes in handy also in other much more mundane tasks, for instance, accounting, managing purchase records, and HR documentation.

Now, let’s talk for a moment about text extraction. You will find tons of useful information in this blog post about text extraction from images using machine learning. Thanks to this NLP technique, you can:

  • Facilitate the process of digitizing your older documents and records
  • Easily turn your printed documents into fully-fledged PDF files, and finally
  • Streamline SEO processes (you can use NLP to identify specific keywords in your texts and websites, but also product names, descriptions, etc.)

Product recommendations

In the modern e-commerce world, product recommendations and personalization of offer are your fundamentals. Without these features, your store will never grow as quickly as possible. NLP can help you provide users with accurate product recommendations that match the interests and desires of your customers. How do product recommendations actually work? They are based on NLP and frequently machine learning. These systems consider several elements, including:

  • The profile of previous customer activity
  • Customer preferences
  • Past purchases
  • Social media data
  • And sometimes even customer location and weather conditions

Thanks to all that information, recommendation engines display results that are most likely to interest the specific user. Of course, their main role is to help you sell more and retain more users.

Today, every reputable e-commerce business extensively uses product recommendations, and they use machine learning to make them even more effective. We talked a lot about product recommendations in our piece about machine learning in e-commerce.

Social media listening

Lastly, we want to talk about something that almost every company operating online should do on a daily basis: Social media listening. In short, social media listening is the process of monitoring your social media channels, but also the entire web, for mentions of your brand, offered products and services, and even competitors. Brands all over the world use social media listening in order to:

  • Find out what customers really think about them
  • Improve their products and services (by determining their soft spots and eliminating them)
  • Monitor their competitors’ activity

Today, there are tens of diverse social media listening platforms you can use. The majority of them are based on some sort of NLP application or algorithm. How can your business benefit from social media listening? Find the best solution and start monitoring web and customer opinions in order to understand their needs and shopping habits. This way, you will be able to monitor current market trends, target your marketing campaigns more effectively, and, in some cases, even predict the future product demand.

As you can see, natural language processing goes far beyond smart assistants. This technology is, in fact, very versatile and can be used to enhance your business on several different levels. If you’d like to make the most of NLP in your company, drop us a line! Addepto is an experienced AI consulting company. We will gladly help you devise and implement technological solutions that will meet your needs and expectations.

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