Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on the interpretation and comprehension of human speech. It involves converting spoken input into a structured representation that machines can understand, enabling them to execute commands, respond to queries, or perform tasks based on the spoken language. This process typically involves several components, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe spoken words into text, natural language understanding (NLU) to analyze and derive meaning from the text, and dialogue management to handle interactions in a contextually appropriate manner. SLU is commonly applied in voice-activated assistants, customer service applications, and conversational agents, facilitating human-computer interaction by allowing users to communicate naturally through speech.