Define intents, utterances, and entities

Utterances are the phrases that a user might enter when interacting with an application that uses your language model. An intent represents a task or action the user wants to perform, or more simply the meaning of an utterance. You create a model by defining intents and associating them with one or more utterances.

For example, consider the following list of intents and associated utterances:

• GetTime:
  • “What time is it?”
  • “What is the time?”
  • “Tell me the time”
• GetWeather:
  • “What is the weather forecast?”
  • “Do I need an umbrella?”
  • “Will it snow?”
• TurnOnDevice
  • “Turn the light on.”
  • “Switch on the light.”
  • “Turn on the fan”
• None:
  • “Hello”
  • “Goodbye”

In your model, you must define the intents that you want your model to understand, so spend some time considering the domain your model must support and the kinds of actions or information that users might request. In addition to the intents that you define, every model includes a None intent that you should use to explicitly identify utterances that a user might submit, but for which there is no specific action required (for example, conversational greetings like “hello”) or that fall outside of the scope of the domain for this model.