Why NLP is Everywhere: From Chatbots to Your Gmail Inbox

Why NLP?

In ancient times, the only way for humans to understand each other was through communication. Later, humans evolved, and computers came into the picture. At first, a computer was just a machine that could perform tasks faster than humans. But now, technology has advanced so much that we are trying to create machines that can not only process information but also communicate with us in natural human language.

Goal

The main goal of NLP is to make machines understand and communicate in natural language.
Natural language can take different forms such as speech, text, or even singing.

Applications

When people talk about NLP applications, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a chatbot. That’s not wrong—but NLP goes far beyond that! Let me walk you through some interesting real-world applications:

1) Contextual Advertisement

You must have noticed that whenever you search for a product or an item on Google (or any other platform), advertisements are shown to you based on your previous searches.
In simple words: ads are personalized according to your past activities—whether you searched for food, clothes, or gadgets. This personalization is powered by NLP.

2) Email Clients

Email platforms use NLP for features like spam filtering and smart replies.

• Spam filtering: Helps separate unwanted emails from the inbox.

• Smart replies: Suggests quick responses based on the context of the received email, so you don’t always need to type replies manually.

3) Social Media

Platforms like Twitter analyze tweets and predict trends. For example, during elections, Twitter data can be used to predict which leader might win based on people’s discussions and sentiments expressed in tweets.

4) Chatbots

Probably the most common application you know about. Chatbots are widely used in food delivery websites and customer support. Since restaurants or service providers cannot handle millions of queries manually, chatbots act as virtual assistants and resolve customer queries efficiently.

✨ That’s why NLP is such a powerful and fascinating field—it’s everywhere around us, even if we don’t always realize it!