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Intents

Intents contain the phrases used to trigger actions in your voice-driven application. To get started with creating intents enable the NLU in a hear-node, or in the NLU tab in the workspace.

Enabling the NLU

Workspace

While a project is open click the NLU-tab in the workspace. After enabling the NLU this tab will be populated with the NLU manager.

Enable NLU

Hear node

Click the "Use NLU" toggle in a hear node to set it to NLU-mode. You can see if a hear-node is a NLU node by observing a NLU badge at the bottom of it. After toggling NLU on the hear node, click "Enable NLU". Congrats, the NLU is enabled. Be careful with renaming intents. For the moment, if an intent is renamed the reference in any hear nodes will be broken requiring you to reconfigure your hear nodes to use the renamed intent. Updating any other properties of an intent will also apply to all hear nodes.

Enable NLU in hear-node

Intent anatomy

Now that the NLU is enabled you can start building your interaction model.

NLU Overview

Intent requirements

  • Intent names must only contain lowercase letters and underscores. No uppercase letters, digits or special characters are permitted.
  • Intent names must be unique.
  • Your intent must contain at least one sample utterance.
  • Sample utterances with slots must have the slot types set.

If any of these requirements are not met warnings will be displayed. Your project will still run but to minimize potential issues it is recommended to configure your intents properly.

Sample utterances

Sample utterances are the phrases that the user can say to invoke an intent. When you create a new intent a sample utterance will be created for you automatically. Utterances can contain slots that allow you to capture variables. Slots can be defined by using variable syntax, i.e. go {direction} where direction is the slot used.

Slots referenced in the utterances will be listed where you can configure their types. Slots referenced where no types are attached will result in warnings. You can apply built-in slot types or create custom slot types.