How does Natural Language Interaction Work?

Natural Language Interaction uses powerful linguistic libraries and rules to enable humans to talk to machines (computers) in free-format, natural language conversations.

It is made commercially available through our award-winning Teneo Interaction Engine. Natural Language Interaction should not be confused with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) solutions which convert spoken words to text and is typically used for relatively simple applications such as keyword based voice interfaces. Natural Language Interaction utilizes ASR to ‘capture' spoken word and then provides the ‘brain-power' to analyze, reason and react to what is being said. Click on the following link to learn more about the differences between NLI, TTS and ASR.

Natural Language Interaction follows three key steps to process user input and react in an intelligent way.

1. Analyze

It first analyzes the user’s input – either spoken or in text - using a robust linguistic understanding library to understand and then derive the meaning (or potential meanings), from the input. At this stage, it eliminates ambiguity, for example, if a user asks about a ‘bank’ on a financial website, it knows that the user is referring to a financial institution and not a mound of earth!

2. Reason

Advanced linguistic interpretation and business rules are used to simulate ‘intelligent thinking’, allowing it to reason like a human and determine the most appropriate way to react, taking into account contextual factors such as the day of the week, user location, information from previous dialogs and data about the user retrieved from back- office systems such as CRM systems.

3. React

The last stage is to perform the necessary actions in the most appropriate manner. This may be to give a suitable verbal or textual response, to ask for more information, open a webpage, play a video, open another app, automatically fill in a form or execute a transaction by updating a database or integrating with one of your backend or e-commerce systems.

These three steps all happen seamlessly in milliseconds, with Teneo able to handle thousands of interactions simultaneously. But it doesn’t end here; there is a constant process of improvement. Teneo Insight gives unprecedented levels of insight and understanding and this knowledge is used to constantly update the knowledge of your solution.

Teneo Studio is used to make these updates. Teneo Studio is an intuitive, user friendly tool that allows non-technical, non-linguists to build intelligent, humanlike and capable virtual assistants, delivering significantly reduced time to market, a faster return on investment and putting you in control of any updated responses and process flows.