Exploring Natural Language Understanding

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated April 16, 2026
  • 1 minute to read
  • ServiceNow® Natural Language Understanding (NLU) provides an NLU Workbench and an NLU inference service that you can use to enable the system to learn and respond to human-expressed intent. By entering natural language examples into the system, you help it understand word meanings and contexts so it can infer user or system actions.

    Natural Language Understanding overview

    Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a component of artificial intelligence natural-language processing that deals with machine-reading comprehension. Predictive Intelligence uses NLU so the system can understand word meanings and word contexts to infer user or system actions.

    Natural Language Understanding benefits

    Benefit Feature Users
    Use the NLU Workbench to create models for Virtual Agent and AI Search. NLU Workbench NLU Administrator
    Build the model's content by adding intents, entities, vocabulary, and test set utterances. Your NLU model content determines how the model responds to user inputs. Model Management NLU Administrator
    Add a language to an existing NLU model by translating it. Use one of several translation options to add a secondary model in a supported language. Model Management NLU Administrator
    Virtual Agent administrators can access and update their NLU models from within the Virtual Agent Designer user interface. Virtual Agent Integration Virtual Agent Administrator