Despite being seemingly obvious that NLI (Natural Language Interface) has wide applicability to many applications and software systems there are specific areas where NLI is already used today and has demonstrated its unique capabilities.
Natural Language enhanced search is one area where NLI has been successful for a number of years already. Look at Google Analytics, GMail, JIRA, or many other applications that allow you to search, filter or sort their content with natural language queries. This use case is a perfect application of NLI as it naturally augments the existing UI/UX by replacing often cumbersome and hard-to-use search/filter/sort UX with a simple text box.
As a matter of fact, all major general purpose search platforms today (i.e. Google, Bing, or Siri) use NLI-enhanced approach to their search queries processing.
NLI is clearly at the heart of any chatbot implementation. And although most initial naive implementations of chatbots have struggles to gain traction - the advancement in NLI technology is allowing modern chatbots to become gradually more sophisticated and outgrow the early "childhood" problems of parasitic dialogues, lack of contextual awareness, inability to comprehend a spoken, free-form language, and primitive rule-based logic.
Fully deterministic NLI systems like NLPCraft provide critical technology for NLI-based data reporting. Unlike data insights analytics or data exploration, the data reporting typically cannot rely on the probabilistic nature of ML/DL-based approaches as it must provide 100% correctness in all cases.
NLPCraft employs advanced semantic modelling that provides fully deterministic results and natural language comprehension.
One of the most exciting applications of NLI is an ad-hoc data analytics or data exploration. This is the area where the proper NLI application can bring about a fundamental seismic change to how we explore our data and discover the insights from it.
Today the most data is walled off in the silos of the individual, incompatible data systems making it mostly inaccessible to the all but a few "power" users. Very few can gain access to all the different systems in a typical company, learn all the different ways to analyse the data and master incompatible and drastically different user interfaces.
The NLI-based approach can democratize access to the sprawling silo-ed data with a single unified UX by allowing users to use the natural language to explore and analyse the data. The natural language is the only UX/UI that everyone already knows, requires no training or learning and is universal regardless of the data source.
With the popularization of consumer technologies like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Mercedes MBUX and similar the NLI-based control of various devices and systems becoming a norm.
While most of these systems today can only understand the rudimentary 2-3 words command the advancements in NLI technology is rapidly leading to more sophisticated interfaces. The enterprise world is starting to catch up and NLI-based systems appear today in various manufacturing, oil and gas, pharma and medical applications.
