Best Practices for Creating Intents

Owned by Catherine Hillier (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 15, 2022
2 min read

For an overview of Conversational AI, click here.

Creating Intents is an iterative process. We’ve collected some best practice suggestions for you to follow:

Tip 1: To create an intent, think of different ways to convey the meaning of the intended message

Example:

Intent: Greeting

Intent: Greeting

Thanks for taking the time to meet with me

How are you?

Thank you for taking the time to join me

thanks for coming in today

I appreciate you joining me this morning

come on in

I thank you for meeting with me

Thanks for joining me

Thanks for meeting with me

Thanks for making time for this meeting.

This “Greeting Intent” is to greet the employee to the meeting.

  • Note that the same intention is structured in different ways with each phrase

Tip 2: It can be helpful to canvas colleagues and friends on how they would say things to convey the meaning of the intent

They may have ideas you had not considered.

Tip 3: The more varied examples you can provide the better the intent will be

  • Concentrate on a variety of ways to convey the same meaning with different sentence formations, slang and grammar as opposed to strictly focusing on the number of phrases

  • We strongly suggest adding in all forms of slang and abbreviations. So based on our Greeting Intent above, add examples of both:

    • Thanks and Thank you

    • Meet and Meeting

    • Join and Joining

If you were adding “Hello” then you could also include: Hey, How’s it going, Hiya, Howdy, Hi, Welcome, S’up, etc…

  • Try including grammatical errors and misspellings

  • Try include phrases the agent could think was being spoken. An example of this was in a hospital environment where the medical phrase was “Uterine Tone” so we aded the Intent “You’re here in town”.

Tip 4: Do NOT share phrases across Intents

This can cause the Agent processing to fail. Ensure you are using specific language for each intent.