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Language Understanding

Language Understanding

A machine learning-based service to build natural language understanding into apps, bots, and IoT devices. Quickly create enterprise-ready, custom models that continuously improve.

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Consume your custom languages models on the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud, using containers. Learn more

See Language Understanding in action

Remote light control

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"Language understanding technology helps us bridge the gap between what people say and what they mean."
Alexander Mejia, Owner and Creative Director, Human Interact

Benefits

Add natural language understanding to your apps

Designed to identify valuable information in conversations, Language Understanding interprets user goals (intents) and distills valuable information from sentences (entities), for a high quality, nuanced language model. Language Understanding integrates seamlessly with the Speech service for instant Speech to Intent processing, and with the Azure Bot Service, making it easy to create a sophisticated bot.

Quickly build a custom language solution

Powerful developer tools are combined with customizable pre-built apps and entity dictionaries, such as Calendar, Music, and Devices, so you can build and deploy a solution more quickly. Dictionaries are mined from the collective knowledge of the web and supply billions of entries, helping your model to correctly identify valuable information from user conversations.

Always learning and improving

Reinforcement learning is used to continuously improve the quality of the natural language processing models. Once the model starts processing input, Language Understanding begins active learning, allowing you to constantly update and improve the model.

Enterprise-ready, available worldwide

The service is ready to be deployed in commercial applications and can scale with enterprise quality and performance. The service meets international compliance standards and supports 12 languages—making it highly accessible.

"LUIS is very good at understanding people's intent, which was an important point for us. It also has a learning capability, which allows us to continually improve our service."
Daisuke Kezuka, General Manager of Travel Business, NAVITIME

Information Chatbot

Overview

This Informational Bot can answer questions defined in a knowledge set or FAQ using Cognitive Services QnA Maker and answer more open-ended questions using Azure Cognitive Search.

Flow

1 Employee starts the Application Bot
2 Azure Active Directory validates the employee’s identity
3 The employee can ask the bot what type of queries are supported
4 Cognitive Services returns a FAQ built with the QnA Maker
5 The employee defines a valid query
6 The Bot submits the query to Azure Cognitive Search which returns information about the application data
7 Application insights gathers runtime telemetry to help development with Bot performance and usage

Overview
Flow

Commerce chatbot

Overview

Together, the Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding service enable developers to create conversational interfaces for various scenarios like banking, travel, and entertainment. For example, a hotel’s concierge can use a bot to enhance traditional e-mail and phone call interactions by validating a customer via Azure Active Directory and using Cognitive Services to better contextually process customer requests using text and voice. The Speech recognition service can be added to support voice commands.

Flow

1 Customer uses your mobile app
2 Using Azure AD B2C, the user authenticates
3 Using the custom Application Bot, user requests information
4 Cognitive Services helps process the natural language request
5 Response is reviewed by customer who can refine the question using natural conversation
6 Once the user is happy with the results, the Application Bot updates the customer’s reservation
7 Application insights gathers runtime telemetry to help development with Bot performance and usage

Overview
Flow

IoT devices

Overview

Create seamless conversational interfaces with all of your internet-accessible devices—from your connected television or fridge to devices in a connected power plant. LUIS is able to integrate up to 500 intents to translate commands into smart actions.

Flow

1 User logs into Skype and accesses the IoT bot
2 Using voice, the user asks the bot to turn on the lights via the IoT device
3 The request is relayed to a third-party service that has access to the IoT device network
4 The results of the command are returned to the user
5 Application Insights gathers runtime telemetry to help development with bot performance and usage

"We determined that artificial intelligence could be the key to offering our customers the differentiated and personalized service and cohesive customer journey we're aiming for."

Antonia Colin-Jones, Strategic Partnership Program Manager, Dixons Carphone

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