In Chatbot Studio, an Intent is a question-answer pair. Intents include how the intent can be triggered, the chatbot’s reply, and what actions follow it.
This article talks about creating intents in broad terms, with links to other articles which can provide more details on the specifics.
Creating an intent
To create an intent in Chatbot Studio:
- If necessary, click the drop-down in the top left and select the Bot you want to create the intent for.
- Click the Intents page.
- Click the Add intent button.
You can also click on the name of an existing intent to edit it.
Intent details
- Type a Name for your intent. Choose a name that will communicate to other bot whispers what the purpose of the intent is.
- Optionally, give the intent a Public name. The Public name is required if you intend for this intent to be available in suggestions. See Adding public names to intents.
- If you have created categories, click the Category drop-down list to select the appropriate option for this intent. See How to add or remove Categories for your chatbot in Chatbot Studio.
- If you have created scenarios, optionally, click the Scenario drop-down list to select the correct one for this intent. See How to use scenarios to get an overview of your chatbot.
- Finally, click the Type drop-down list to select the appropriate option. Most intents will have the Default type, but other types are important. See Different intent types.
Conditions, queries and triggers
Next, determine how the customer can reach this intent. This might be determined by a combinations of:
- Meeting necessary conditions. See How do Necessary Conditions work?
- Queries typed by the customer, as described below.
- Other triggers. See What is a trigger?
To add a query:
- Click the + next to Add query (user says).
- Type the query as you would expect the customer to type it.
It is strongly recommended that you include variations on the query, because the customer is unlikely to type exactly what you expected. There are two ways to do this, either or both of:
- Click the add new query link to manually enter a new variation.
- Click the
icon next to the query to get some AI-suggested variations.
- Click to tick the queries you want to add.
- Click the Add button.
You should generally aim for 5-10 query variants to help increase the chance of the intent triggering at the correct time.
That said, it is impossible to guess every variation the customer might use (including typos!). If you choose a good variety of alternate queries, the bot will generally be able to find the correct intent anyway.
Replies and actions
Once you have determined what triggers the intent, you must then determine what happens in the intent.
- Type the reply you want this intent to give in the then bot replies field. Give some thought to how the reply fits with the variations of the query. Read more about replies in How does Chatbot know what to reply? and How to make chatbot reply more intelligently
- If there are actions you want this intent to take, click the and performs action drop-down list and select the action. For more information about actions, see Different Action types
- When done, click the Save button to save the intent.