These Five Platforms Will Make Your Bots Language-Intelligent

Let programming from Microsoft, Google, and others help boost your bot’s intelligence.

Published in

Chatbots Magazine

4 min readAug 11, 2016

Natural language is a fundamental element of bot technologies. As a result, there has been a direct correlation between the evolution of bot platforms and natural language processing platforms. While the evolution of bot technologies is been mostly driven by the messaging platform vendors such as Facebook or WeChat, the main advancements in natural language processing technologies seems to be coming from the cloud platform and service providers like Google or IBM. As a result, most bot developers spend time integrating their frontend bot applications with natural language processing services provided by a different platform.

From a conceptual standpoint, there are two main natural language programming techniques that have become popular with bot technologies:

· Natural Language Processing (NLP): In the artificial intelligence(AI) context, NLP is the overarching umbrella that encompasses several disciplines that tackle the interaction between computer systems and human natural languages. From that perspective, NLP includes several sub-disciplines such as discourse analysis, relationship extraction, natural language understanding and a few others language analysis areas.

· Natural Language Understanding (NLU): NLU is a subset of NLP that focuses on reading comprehension and semantic analysis.

The combination of NLP and NLU technologies is becoming increasingly relevant on different software areas today including bot technologies. While there are many vendors and platforms focused on NLP-NLU technologies, the following technologies are becoming extremely popular within the bot developer community.

Featured CBM: Does a Bot Need Natural Language Processing?

Some NLP-NLU Technologies That Will Make Your Bots Language-Intelligent

Watson Conversation Service

The Watson Developer Cloud provides several services focused on language processing. Watson’s Conversation Service(WCS) is specially focused on automating interactions between systems and end users. Using WCS users can define NLP aspects such as intents, entities and simulate entire conversations. WCS is typically used in conjunction with other Watson NLP services such as Alchemy Language or Natural Language Classifier.

For more: Building an IBM Watson Powered AI Chatbot

Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligence Service

Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligence Service(LUIS) is a component of the Microsoft Cognitive Services focused on creating and processing natural language models. LUIS provides a sophisticated toolset that allow developers to train the platform in new conversation models. LUIS can also be used in conjunction with other text processing APIs in MCS such as linguistic analysis and text analytics. The platform provides a deep integration with Microsoft’s Bot Framework and can be used by other bot platforms.

Google Natural Language API

Google Natural Language(NL) API is a recent addition to Google Cloud focused on NLP and NLU capabilities. The NL API enables capabilities such as intent-entity detection, sentiment analysis, content classification and relationship graphs. The NL API also includes sophisticated tooling for training and authoring new NL models. Google NL platform is actively used by several high profile services such as Google’s Assistant.

Wit.ai

Wit.ai is the platform behind the NLP-NLU capabilities of Facebook Messenger platform. Facebook acquired Wit.ai in January 2015 and, since then, has rolled out major updates to the platform. One of the best capabilities of Wit.ai is the sophisticated toolset that can be used to train the platform in new conversation models as well as monitoring the interactions between users and the platform.

Api.ai

Api.ai provides a platform that allow developers to design and implement conversational interfaces that can be integrated into external applications like bots. Functionally, Api.ai includes capabilities such as speech recognition, fulfillment and NLU as well as a robust management toolset. Api.ai provides integration with several bot platforms and is particularly popular within the Slack community.

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