CityFront Blog

If the future of the American worker conjures up images of scarred landscapes dotting a smoldering planet menaced by machines, you’re not alone. While not quite of the movie-quality variety, various respected sources predict millions of workers will be displaced by automation of one kind or another, and many professions may be all but eliminated, akin to the type of far-reaching change brought about by the Industrial revolution.

By now we’re accustomed to meeting natural language processing, or NLP, in our daily routine. Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa and voice response systems greeting us when we call a company’s customer service line are just some of the many ways NLP is used in an attempt to remove friction from task completion. NLP enables computers to read text, hear speech and search for the key phrase in large datasets to return answers to questions spoken or typed into devices. NLP is an attempt to make the way computers interact with humans, to make the interchange between the question and the answer, correspond to the way humans naturally query, or form questions. As SAS explains, “NLP is the branch of AI that enables computers to understand interpret and manipulate human language.” But NLP is only one subset of the incredible growth of use cases for artificial intelligence, or AI, including at the local government level.

Our world is flooded with acronyms, and there is no shortage of these language shortcuts in the technology sector. NLP is a hot acronym of late, referring to natural language processing, a market projected to exceed $22b by 2025. But what exactly is NLP?

Dallas-area CityFront Innovations, the leader in AI technology for mobile city applications, is launching the newest iteration of its natural language processing (NLP) engine, built to power smart city applications, improving service delivery and resident engagement.