The text discusses the 5 steps in natural language processing (NLP) that algorithms follow to analyze and understand spoken and written language. These steps are lexical analysis, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, discourse integration, and pragmatic analysis. Lexical analysis breaks down language into understandable vocabulary units, while syntactic analysis checks word arrangements for proper grammar. Semantic analysis attempts to understand the literal meaning of individual language selections, whereas discourse integration analyzes prior words and sentences to understand ambiguous language. Pragmatic analysis derives the intended meaning of language, not just its literal interpretation. The text also highlights the importance of NLP in business applications such as text-to-speech, chatbots, urgency detection, natural language understanding, autocorrect, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and more. It introduces Twilio's Programmable Voice API as a solution that follows these 5 NLP steps to build compelling voice experiences for customers.