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What is Language Understanding (LUIS)?

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Important

LUIS will be retired on October 1st 2025 and starting April 1st 2023 you will not be able to create new LUIS resources. We recommend migrating your LUIS applications to conversational language understanding to benefit from continued product support and multilingual capabilities.

Note

As of July 2023, Azure AI services encompass all of what were previously known as Cognitive Services and Azure Applied AI Services. There are no changes to pricing. The names Cognitive Services and Azure Applied AI continue to be used in Azure billing, cost analysis, price list, and price APIs. There are no breaking changes to application programming interfaces (APIs) or SDKs.

Language Understanding (LUIS) is a cloud-based conversational AI service that applies custom machine-learning intelligence to a user's conversational, natural language text to predict overall meaning, and pull out relevant, detailed information. LUIS provides access through its custom portal, APIs and SDK client libraries.

For first time users, follow these steps to sign in to LUIS portal To get started, you can try a LUIS prebuilt domain app.

This documentation contains the following article types:

  • Quickstarts are getting-started instructions to guide you through making requests to the service.
  • How-to guides contain instructions for using the service in more specific or customized ways.
  • Concepts provide in-depth explanations of the service functionality and features.
  • Tutorials are longer guides that show you how to use the service as a component in broader business solutions.

What does LUIS Offer

  • Simplicity: LUIS offloads you from the need of in-house AI expertise or any prior machine learning knowledge. With only a few clicks you can build your own conversational AI application. You can build your custom application by following one of our quickstarts, or you can use one of our prebuilt domain apps.
  • Security, Privacy and Compliance: LUIS is backed by Azure infrastructure, which offers enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance. Your data remains yours; you can delete your data at any time. Your data is encrypted while it’s in storage. Learn more about this here.
  • Integration: easily integrate your LUIS app with other Microsoft services like Microsoft Bot framework, QnA Maker, and Speech service.

LUIS Scenarios

  • Build an enterprise-grade conversational bot: This reference architecture describes how to build an enterprise-grade conversational bot (chatbot) using the Azure Bot Framework.
  • Commerce Chatbot: Together, the Azure AI Bot Service and Language Understanding service enable developers to create conversational interfaces for various scenarios like banking, travel, and entertainment.
  • Controlling IoT devices using a Voice Assistant: Create seamless conversational interfaces with all of your internet-accessible devices-from your connected television or fridge to devices in a connected power plant.

Application Development life cycle

LUIS app development life cycle

  • Plan: Identify the scenarios that users might use your application for. Define the actions and relevant information that needs to be recognized.
  • Build: Use your authoring resource to develop your app. Start by defining intents and entities. Then, add training utterances for each intent.
  • Test and Improve: Start testing your model with other utterances to get a sense of how the app behaves, and you can decide if any improvement is needed. You can improve your application by following these best practices.
  • Publish: Deploy your app for prediction and query the endpoint using your prediction resource. Learn more about authoring and prediction resources here.
  • Connect: Connect to other services such as Microsoft Bot framework, QnA Maker, and Speech service.
  • Refine: Review endpoint utterances to improve your application with real life examples

Learn more about planning and building your application here.

Next steps