A brief introduction to natural language

You should always strive to make your bot as helpful as possible. In all the bots we've made so far, we've awaited clear instructions via a key word from the user and then followed said instructions as far as the bot is capable. What if we could infer instructions from users without them actually providing a key word? Enter natural language processing (NLP).

NLP can be described as a field of computer science that strives to understand communication and interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.

In layman's terms, NLP is the process of a computer interpreting conversational language and responding by executing a command or replying to the user in an equally conversational tone.

Examples of NLP projects are digital assistants such as the iPhone's Siri. Users can ask questions or give commands and receive answers or confirmation in natural language, seemingly from a human.

One of the more famous projects using NLP is IBM's Watson system...