Being able to determine the meaning in a human language statement or query. When used in conjunction with voice recognition, people can speak their questions instead of typing them. Natural language processing is highly computation intensive, and the algorithms differ greatly between spoken languages.
Indispensable Today
Due to the combination of their voice and natural language recognition capabilities, smartphone and tablet intelligent assistants have become essential. Simple questions are processed in the device, but more complicated ones are uploaded to servers in a datacenter, and the results are sent back to the mobile device. As data transmission rates increase with each cellular generation and as mobile processors become faster, natural language recognition becomes the norm rather than the exception. See
virtual assistant and
voice recognition.