BACKGROUND

Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems have progressed to the point where humans can interact with computing devices using their voices. Such systems employ techniques to identify the words spoken by a human user based on the various qualities of a received audio input. An SLU system combines speech recognition and natural language understanding processing techniques enabling speech-based user control of a computing device to perform tasks based on the user's spoken commands. The combination of speech recognition and natural language understanding techniques is referred to herein as natural language processing. Natural language processing may also involve converting a user's speech into text data which may then be provided to various text-based software applications.

Spoken language understanding may be used by computers, hand-held devices, telephone computer systems, kiosks, and a wide variety of other devices to improve human-computer interactions.

