NLU (Natural Language Understanding)

NLU is the part of a conversational AI system that turns a sentence someone actually typed or said into a structured meaning the software can act on — what they want, and what information they’ve already given.

“I need to move tomorrow’s 4pm appointment” has to become, internally, something like: intent = reschedule, entity = existing booking, new time = unspecified — before any system can act on it, whether that system is a booking calendar or a human reading a summary. NLU is that translation step, and it’s what separates a system that understands a customer from one that is just matching keywords.

It’s usually invisible to the person building an assistant, sitting underneath whatever they actually configure — the knowledge base, the instructions, the escalation rules.

How the assistant itself gets configured, on the assistant builder page.