NLP vs. NLU: What's the Difference and Why Does it Matter?

Conversational interfaces are powered primarily by natural language processing (NLP), and a key subset of NLP is natural language understanding (NLU). While NLU is a subset of NLP, NLP doesn't always involve NLU. The terms NLP and NLU are often used interchangeably, but they have slightly different meanings. Developers need to understand the difference between natural language processing and natural language understanding so they can build successful conversational applications. Natural language processing is a subset of AI, and it involves programming computers to process massive volumes of language data.