Configure intents

An intent recognition assistant is trained to identify specific intents from user inputs and uses a reasoning process to ask questions until all intents are identified.

You must create an intent set first before adding an intent recognition assistant to link it to.

Create intent sets

Intent sets are groups of related intents, called intent slots, that must be identified. The system asks questions to gather the information needed to fill the required slots. If it cannot identify all slots in the initial input, it will ask follow-up questions until it reaches the predefined loop limit.

To create a new intent set:

1. Click New Intent Set on the Intent Recognition tab.

1. Add a name and description for the intent set. These are for internal reference only so you can easily identify them.

2. Add intent slots. These are specific pieces of information that must be identified to fulfill an intent.

   1. Name: Enter a name for the intent slot.

   2. Description: The description helps the system understand what to look for.

   3. Examples of expected responses: Provide examples of what responses the system can expect for this slot. This does not have to be a complete list.

   4. Required flag: The required flag indicates whether the slot must be identified for the intent to be considered complete.

1. Set a loop limit (max. 20) to prevent infinite loops. This limit defines the maximum number of attempts the system will make to identify all required slots before displaying the failed attempt message (see below).

2. Enter a failed attempt message. This message is displayed to the end-user when the loop limit has been reached (see above).

3. Save.

Example 1

USER: What is the weather in Cape Town tomorrow morning?

• The system classifies this as a weather intent.

• “Cape Town” is detected as a location slot and "tomorrow morning” as a date_time slot.

Example 2

USER: “I owe Lisa money”

ASSISTANT: "Do you want to pay her back? How much would you like to pay?"

USER: "Yes, 120."

ASSISTANT: "To confirm, you want to pay 120 dollars to Lisa from your savings account. Is that correct? Tap below to pay now.”

USER: * Taps button *

• In this scenario, the bot understood the initial request, and then filled the intent slots with the information gathered by asking a few questions:

  • the action (pay),

  • the amount (500),

  • the currency (USD), and

  • the recipient (Lisa)

• The assistant gathers this information conversationally and passes it to the back-end, to execute the end-user's request.