OK Google

Ever wondered how your personal assistant understands everything you say? No, Macaulay Culkin doesn’t live in your phone. Let’s peek behind the Google Assistant curtain and take a look at Natural Language Processing.

So exactly what is Natural Language Processing?

Computers don’t speak languages the way humans do.

They communicate in machine code or machine language, while we speak English, Dutch, French or some other human language.

Most of us don’t understand the millions of zeros and ones computers communicate in. And in turn, computers don’t understand human language unless they are programmed to do so.

That’s where Natural Language Processing (NLP) comes in.

Natural language processing is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to read, understand and interpret human language.

It helps computers measure sentiment and determine which parts of human language are important.

Natural Language Processing powered software helps us in various ways on a daily basis right from finding your way on Google Maps to booking a table at your favourite restaurant; example- your very own Google Assistant.

But that’s not it! Google Natural Language Api also provides us with Text Analysis.

Google Natural Language Api uses machine learning to decode the structure and meaning of particular text which helps us get information about people, places, events etc. and also helps us understand better about social media sentiment and customer conversations.

To understand better, get hands-on practice with machine learning as it applies to language processing by taking labs that will enable you to extract entities from text, and perform sentiment and syntactic analysis as well as use the Speech to Text API for transcription in the Intro to ML: Language Processing Quest. Use Code 1q-okgoogle-21