---
title: Exploring Natural Language Understanding
description: 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.
locale: en-US
canonical_url: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/australia/intelligent-experiences/nlu-service/nlu-explore.html
release: australia
product: NLU Service
classification: nlu-service
topic_type: concept
last_updated: "2026-04-16"
reading_time_minutes: 1
breadcrumb: [Natural Language Understanding, Enable AI experiences]
---

# Exploring Natural Language Understanding

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|