About Intents

An Intent is the Intention behind the message the AI service receives from the person speaking.

For example, a learner says, ‘Hello, thanks for coming in today.’ The Intent behind the message is to greet the person/character they are speaking to.

An Intent-based Agent, then, works by detecting this learner Intent. So, instead of relying on specific input or set of key words, the Agent can identify the meaning the message is trying to convey. (And then offer a relevant, tailored response.)

Guidelines for Creating Intents

An Intent is manually generated by the scenario author by supplying “training phrases” or different ways to convey the meaning of the Intent. The more examples you include in an Intent, the more likely the AI will be successful in identifying the Intent and returning the expected response.

For example - as an author creating the training “Greeting” Intent you could use the following training phrases:

• Hello, thanks for coming in today.

• Hi, how are you?

• Hello, good to see you, thanks for joining me

• Hi, thank you for making the time, have a seat

• Great to see you, I’m glad you could join me

• Good morning, thanks for coming in

• Good afternoon, [Name], come on it

etc.

When creating Intents, it can be helpful to canvas colleagues and friends on how they would say things to convey the meaning of the Intent. The more varied examples you can provide the better the Intent will be.

Steps to create an Intent

Follow these steps to create Intents for your scenarios

Step 1: Create an Intent Catalog

• Navigate to the AI tab on the project dashboard

• Open the Intents section and click “Create”

Open

• Give the catalog a name and click “Create a new catalog”

Open

Step 2: Create an Intent

• Click on “Create” to create your first Intent

• Fill in the name, and a description, then click “Create Intent”

• Click on the Intent to add examples

Step 3: Add Training Phrases

When creating an Intent, it is best practice to add a minimum of 10 training phrases (or examples of ways you may convey the Intent). Here are some example phrases you could use for the “Greeting” Intent:

• Click “create” to add your first training phrase

• Add the example phrase

• Add the rest of the examples listed above to this Intent. Create more of your own if you can think of different ways you may greet an employee at the beginning of a conversation.

• When you are finished adding examples click “Build”. This trains the Agent on this Intent.

Step 4: Test the Intent

• Click on the blue microphone icon and try a greeting

• Click the “stop” icon when you have finished speaking

• The test will report the Intent detected and the “confidence” or certainty the the Intent is a match.

Related Article:

Best Practices for Creating Intents