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.
See Language Understanding in action
Smart light application in action
LUIS application response
"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
Explore Language Understanding scenarios
Information Chatbot
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 Search.
- 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 Search which returns information about the application data
- 7 Application insights gathers runtime telemetry to help development with Bot performance and usage
"Conversation as a platform is the future, so it's great that we’re already offering it to our customers using the Bot Framework and Azure."
See how UPS is using LUIS to help customers track packages in real time
Commerce chatbot
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.
- 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
"It's amazing, once development started, how quickly the whole thing came together… We didn't need to build any special functionality to connect the bot to our product catalog and stock data—we just used existing feeds."
IoT devices
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.
- 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
"It's really simple and seamless to move data into the cloud. And if customers want to apply machine learning or predictive analytics, they can do so without additional complexity."
See how Rockwell Automation is using the Microsoft IoT Suite
"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
"Dynamics 365, as well as LUIS for interacting with the bot using natural language, are very intuitive and easy to use."
Melanie Sachse, Central Sales Development and Digitalization, VHV Allgemeine Versicherung AG
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