Natural language processing is the science (and art) of parsing, analyzing, and reconstructing natural language, such as written or spoken English, French, or German. It's not an easy task; natural language processing (NLP) is an entire field of research with a vibrant academic research community and significant financial backing from major tech firms. Every time companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft invest in their Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana products, the field of NLP gets a little more funding. In short, NLP is why you can talk to your phone and your phone can talk back to you.
Siri is a lot more than NLP. We, as consumers, like to criticize our artificial intelligence (AI) assistants when they get something laughably wrong. But they are truly marvels of engineering, and the fact that they get anything...