5 Greatest Impacts of NLP on Our Everyday Life

Whatever you have been up to this week -  heading to work, doing your weekly shop or even just sitting at home and scrolling through social media, you have almost certainly encountered an NLP solution without acknowledging it.

1) Smarter customer service

One of the most visible, public-facing uses of NLP is within customer service. NLP-powered virtual assistants and chatbots, both in-store and online, are commonplace within banking apps, retail platforms, healthcare portals and utilities websites. 

These AI powered chatbots have the capability to interpret, understand and respond to questions and queries in natural human language in real-time. We’ve delved into greater detail about virtual sales assistants and how they work here, if you are interested.

It isn’t just the automation of these tasks that is transformational. The scale that NLP-powered chatbots can be deployed enables businesses to serve customers 24/7, 365 days a year. 

Not only does this benefit the customer who can enjoy round-the-clock support, but it also reduces the need for businesses to invest in costly human agents to handle repetitive basic tasks. 

There are some customer service tasks that NLP solutions are still not best equipped to handle. In these circumstances, escalation to human support agents is often a built-in feature, with NLP helping to classify and route the customer issue to the right department efficiently - a welcomed addition for online businesses operating with a large number of clientele and staff. 

2) Smart devices

Whether you use Alexa, Siri, the Google Assistant or any number of other voice-activated smart devices, it is undeniable that they have become commonplace for many of us. 

Recent advancements in NLP have enabled these smart devices to handle a range of tasks from simply telling us the weather through to making e-commerce purchases and confirming appointments. 

These voice-driven commands provide a new avenue for enterprises to encourage customer engagement, streamline their internal operations and to help make their platforms more accessible. For the individual end user, smart devices can increase productivity and convenience.

3) Improved decision making

Data is a vital tool in our decision making process. It helps to guide opinions based on evidence and fact, rather than just a whim or a gut feeling. 

However, there is such a thing as too much data for an individual to be able to consume and understand by themselves. That’s where custom NLP solutions by NetGeist and other established AI developers come into their own.

NLP is helping to change the way we understand and utilize large datasets. Not only can these tools be trained to create actionable insights from unstructured datasets, they have opened up a new avenue to be able to interact and ‘interrogate’ the data. 

Chatbots trained on specific datasets, whether it be anything from medical information through to financial earnings reports, can respond to data-specific queries. 

Within the healthcare industry, information such as clinical notes, discharge summaries and patient history can be uploaded as a dataset, and NLP tools set to work to extract key information that medical staff can interpret.

4) Content personalization

The average person spends nearly 2.5 hours a day on social media globally, with Gen Z reported to spend upwards of 3 hours every day on the platforms. 

The addictive nature of social media is largely influenced by how personalized the content suggestions are. 

NLP is one of the technologies deployed by social media companies to personalize and target the content you are served every time you open one of the apps. 

This real-time personalization, delivering unique social media feeds to every user, is made possible in-part by the deployment of NLP to understand the sort of content that each user wants to engage with. 

Brands also rely upon sentiment analysis, an NLP-driven capability, to adapt their marketing strategies. 

Firms can analyse customer reviews, social media comments and customer feedback forms to find out exactly how their customers feel about their products and services in significantly greater details than any numerical survey could ever collate.

5) Global communication

It was only back in 1979 - in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that a real-time translation of any language was seen as a futuristic bit of science fiction. 

Through recent developments in NLP, real-time translations are now scientific reality. Tools such as DeepL, powered by NLP, have significantly reduced the barrier to cross-cultural communication, quite literally breaking down the language barriers that have long divided people. 

These advanced models don’t just translate word-for-word, instead they understand intricate linguistic details such as nuance and idioms to produce language-specific accurate translations.

This breakthrough in global communication has far reaching implications. Businesses can enter new markets with ease. 

Travellers can navigate around far-flung countries without breaking a sweat. 

Schools can open up new learning opportunities to students around the world. It is no exaggeration to say that this deployment of natural language processing has revolutionized global communication.

Closing remarks

NLP solutions are firmly embedded in many aspects of our daily lives. We’ve listed five of the most commonly known uses, but if you pay special attention, you will start to notice the incorporation of natural language processing in a surprisingly vast selection of industries and use cases. It is easy to understand why. 

These tools are helping to simplify the complex, automate routine tasks and to improve access to information on a global scale. 

Businesses that use NLP will gain a competitive edge over their legacy competitors. 

Partnering with an NLP specialist such as NetGeist will open the door for your organization to have a custom solution developed specifically for your use case. Contact us to discuss how NLP could impact your business.