Language & NLP
Natural language understandingNLU
Natural language understanding (NLU) is the branch of AI that interprets what a person *means* from natural language — extracting intent and key entities — rather than just recognizing the words. It's how a voice agent knows a caller wants to reschedule, and for when.
NLU is a subset of NLP focused on comprehension. In a voice agent it sits between speech-to-text and the response logic, turning a transcript into structured meaning the agent can act on.
Related terms
Natural language processingThe broad field of AI concerned with computers understanding, interpreting and generating human language — the foundation under conversational AI.Intent recognitionIdentifying the goal behind what a caller says — e.g. 'book appointment', 'check balance', 'cancel' — so the agent can act on it.Entity extractionPulling the specific details out of what a caller says — dates, names, amounts, phone numbers — that the agent needs to complete a task.Large language modelAn AI model trained on vast text that generates and understands language. LLMs are the reasoning engine inside modern conversational and voice AI.
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