Hello Bot! 2

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the main theme of the event organized by Eta Kappa Nu that took place at Camplus in Lingotto on 8 June 2017.

NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way. By utilizing NLP, developers can organize and structure knowledge to perform tasks such as automatic summarization, translation, named entity recognition, relationship extraction, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and topic segmentation.

The talks held by experts with significant expertise in this field, helped us a lot in order to get an overview of some Text to Speech and Speech to Text techniques. Their goal is to extract language features in a similar way to how the human ear does and recognise them as phonemes and sounds that we use as part of our conversations. This involves a complex process that includes audio sampling, feature extraction and then speech recognition to recognise individual sounds and convert them to text.

Applied to the context of chatbots, NLP helps them to understand the requests and reply in the most proper way. This includes extensive use of concepts that are part of the broad field of artificial intelligence.

After having dealt with all of these theoretical themes, we got to the practical part through a workshop in which we tried all together to create a simple vocal assistant.