When we first launched Kip, we noticed people chatting images in conversation. Users sent images, emoji or stickers to Kip instead of typing a response. That’s when it hit us — these responses are a part of Natural Language Understanding, or what experts would call a linguistic register.

What’s a linguistic register?

When you’re typing a formal cover letter, you won’t use words like “lol” or “kk”. At the same time, using “by your leave” or “salutations” sounds strange when hanging out with friends. So when we say “that sounds weird,” it means that the linguistic register is wrong.

Registers are a fascinating field of linguistics, ranging from how slang is created to why people think differently in different languages.

Linguistic Registers for messaging apps

If people speak differently based on social situations,

then people speak differently across messaging apps.

We applied this theory to chat messaging. As Kip is a shopping chatbot, top incoming user chats are photos of items, brand logos and emojis. We dropped in a machine vision layer to understand our users more (Beta).