Plain English
Embedding
A list of numbers that captures what a piece of text means, so software can find similar things.
A way of turning text (or images) into a list of numbers that represents its meaning, so that similar meanings end up close together. It lets software search by meaning instead of exact words.
Why it matters
Embeddings power “chat with your documents” tools and smarter search. When a tool says it searches your files by meaning, this is usually how.
At work
The search on your help page finds the “returns” article when a customer types “send it back,” because the two mean nearly the same thing.
Think of it like shelving books by topic rather than by title: books about the same thing end up side by side, even when their titles share no words.
Related terms