Some proponents of chatbots believe that, once we conquer natural language understanding, software systems will start communicating like humans. They say that agents will speak with other agents to get things done, with no API and no data contracts required. That remains to be seen. In the meantime, I would like to take you on a journey of building an app – not a chatbot – that was designed to use natural language as its only interface and API … well, sort of. Was it easy to build? Easy to integrate with? Did it help making the app multimodal and run on web, mobile, chat, and Alexa? I’ll answer these questions, and share lessons learned from my experiment designing and building a natural language first system.

1. NATURAL LANGUAGE FIRST APIs
To be, or not to be
@ p v e l l e r

4. 25%

5. 50%

9. 157%

12. PAVEL VELLER
CTO, DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT PRACTICE @ EPAM Systems
@ P V E L L E R
BLAH BLAH BLAH, NOBODY CARES…
https://www.epam.com
https://www.pveller.com

15. Natural Language
API

16. Natural Language
Understanding

17. 1. Intent Detection
2. Named Entity Recognition

18. Please schedule a meeting
with Robert for tomorrow at
2pm

19. • Mark date as traveled
• Mark date as not traveled

21. I will be in Stockholm
on October 22th, 23th, and 24th

22. I was in SFO this past Tue and Wed

23. Assumptions

25. JSON is a text format that is completely
language independent […]
These properties make JSON an ideal
data-interchange language.

26.  Named entity recognition
is not easy
 Everybody needs to do
NLU for natural language
APIs to take off

27. The End