Which field of AI focuses on enabling machines to understand and interact with human language?

Natural language processing (NLP) is the field of artificial intelligence that focuses specifically on enabling machines to understand and interact with human language. This encompasses a range of tasks and techniques, including speech recognition, language generation, sentiment analysis, and text classification. NLP relies on computational linguistics and leverages algorithms to interpret and produce human language in a way that is both meaningful and contextually relevant.

This capability is crucial for applications like virtual assistants, chatbots, and translation services, which require a deep understanding of human language nuances, grammar, and semantics. Through NLP, machines can effectively process and respond to text and speech inputs, making them more accessible and useful for human users.

Other fields mentioned, such as computer vision, focus on interpreting and understanding visual information from the world, robotics deals with the design and development of robots that can perform tasks, and expert systems use rule-based reasoning to mimic the decision-making ability of a human expert in a specific domain. While each of these fields is important within the broader context of AI, they do not directly address the interaction between machines and human language as NLP does.