Natural language processing is the capability of computers to understand human language. If you’ve ever gotten into an automated phone tree and heard, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that“ in response to something you said into the phone, then you’ve come up against the limits of natural language processing. Alexa and Siri are popular consumer voice-activated NLPs on the market today. NLP is being applied to health care with limited success so far but this sector is expected to grow. It could, for instance, reduce clerical duties associated with inputting information into electronic health records.
