The first thing that comes to mind is probably; Chatbots. And yes, chatbots are a good example of a project where you can leverage NLU, but NLU can be used for a lot of other projects where transforming natural language into structured data will unlock many possibilities. Here are a few examples:
- A Chatbot. It doesn't have to be complex. You could simply take the text of your user, send it to the NLU for prediction of an intent. With the predicted intent, you can make a simple rule determining what to answer. It's basic but better than a button-based chatbot with no flexibility.
- Natural Language Search. You can augment your search experience by using natural language understanding. Usually, search works with keywords, fewer words is better to avoid confusion. However, you could use natural language understanding on your website and allow people to search the way they want. If you search on Mejuri, "What would be a good gift for my wife?", the search would determine that you are looking for a gift for your wife and would give you the link of that category.
- Automation. You can't use a sentence like "please send me a reminder at 8 PM tomorrow to watch the young and the restless." to automate the creation of a reminder. You will need to use the NLU to recognize the intent and extract the different entities.
Let your imagination run away with this and I am sure you can find some really cool things to do.