Various embodiments disclosed herein provide techniques for performing incremental natural language understanding on a natural language understanding (NLU) system. The NLU system acquires a first audio speech segment associated with a user utterance. The NLU system converts the first audio speech segment into a first text segment. The NLU system determines a first intent based on a text string associated with the first text segment, wherein the text string represents a portion of the user utterance. The NLU system generates a first response based on the first intent prior to when the user utterance completes.