“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.” But, of course, these aren’t the words of a human but of LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent (AI) chatbot generator. Google Engineer Blake Lemoine thinks the AI chatbot has become sapient.
There once was a time when Sentient Robots and Humanoids were a part of science-fiction dystopian movies and novels. They were considered evil and able to take over the human race. They were, however, right about the part where AI would grow massively.
Natural Language Processing is a component of AI in linguistics that deals with interpreting and manipulating human speech or text using the software. It enables the computer to understand the natural way of human communication by combining machine learning, deep learning, and statistical models.
AI has become a technological reality for businesses and organizations across industries. Even if its benefits may not always be easy to quantify, AI has proven itself capable of improving process efficiency, reducing human errors and labor, and extracting insights from big data.
According to a research firm, the NLP market would grow at a CAGR of 20.3%, from USD 11.6 billion in 2020 to USD 35.1 billion by 2026. (Source: GlobalNewsWire)
Let’s take a look into what AI in NLP has to offer in the present and the future
1.) Voice Assistants and Chatbots
We are all aware of Siri and Alexa. Voice assistants use NLP and speech recognition to understand a user’s voice commands and respond accordingly. Similarly, Chatbots are programs designed to assist a user 24/7 and respond and answer appropriately. With more usage, they even improve themselves.
Such applications completely change and improve the Customer Service Industry.
2.) Email Filtering
Gmail classifies all emails into primary, social, and promotional sections. It also segregates Spam emails. The task is accomplished with the help of text classification, which is a technique of NLP. It has helped optimize time and increase productivity.
3.) Translation
Social Media has brought the entire world together but also brought up challenges like the language barrier. Machine Translation, which uses NLP, has made many improvements in the field due to the availability of vast amounts of data and powerful machines and advancements in Machine learning and Neural Networking. It has helped businesses grab foreign customers and social media users connected to people overseas. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have their translation software integrated within the main application.
4.) Sentiment Analysis
With the help of Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a subfield of Natural Language Processing, the machine can catch on to different sentiments that might be insisted on through the user’s command, such as sarcasm, threat, exclamation, etc.
5.) Healthcare
Over the past two years, we have seen how powerful AI can be in expediting drug discovery efforts for COVID-19, forecasting and modeling COVID-19 cases, and building better models for a host of public health measures. The Cloud Healthcare Natural Language API aims to provide fully managed services that deliver the latest advances in NLP in an easy-to-integrate manner. Healthcare organizations can then build intelligent systems to improve care and reduce costs.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence is all around us and is making our lives easier. The future is promising, and there’s enormous scope for it to be implemented in various daily activities. It helps businesses grow and prosper with its efficient use. The abilities of LaMDA are just the start, and there’s more to go.
Such technology helps businesses analyze customer reactions and handle social media disputes by eradicating negative comments and getting insights from their customer base.
