What Is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of building computer systems that can work with human language in text and speech. In this lesson, you will learn what NLP is, why it matters, and how it shows up in everyday products such as search, chatbots, translation, sentiment analysis, and voice assistants.

You will also see how NLP differs from general artificial intelligence, what kinds of language tasks it can handle, and where its limitations begin. This gives you a practical foundation for the rest of the course, where you will learn how NLP systems are built and evaluated.