How to use Intents

Objective

The intent section is where you will create and include the knowledge and training for your agent, which later will be used to classify the caller intent.

Applies To

Vonage AI Studio

Procedure

Your agent will use this list of utterances to classify user inputs.

Every example you will enter should represent a sentence callers may use to attain a specific answer or action. Add as many examples as possible to make sure your agent is trained and able to understand the different ways people are referring to one query.

You can either create a new intent based on your use case, or import an intent from an already existing agent.

Create an Intent

Now, let's create your own intent!

In the left navigation, click on Properties > Intents.

Click ‘Create Intent' in the top left.

Name your intent - should be something that tells you more about its content and purpose.

Insert all the relevant training in the ‘User Expressions’.

You can also create a new intent in the classification node by pressing ‘Add Intent’ clicking the drop-down, and then click ‘Create Intent’.

How to train your agent

Train your agent mostly based on keywords

No full sentences are required. When adding user expressions, it is important to keep the essence of the intent and leave out all the meaningless parts of a sentence.

E.g. "I want to request a loan" - Add "Request loan" to the training set

Be creative

‌Some people refer to "scheduling with someone" as a "meeting", others might call it an "appointment". Try to use various different wording and phrasing to refer to the same thing.

E.g. Meeting: Appointment, Interview, Consultation, Date, Meet, etc.

Once the agent is live and interacts with callers, it is helpful to add more training based on real-life communication with the callers.

Step 1

After the initial greeting, for example, collect the input of the caller in a Collect Input node. Add a TOPIC Parameter connected to a sys.any entity.

Step 2

Add a Classification node and use the same TOPIC parameter. Now it's time to add intents. If you haven't already, click on "Create intent". For the sake of the example, call it "balance" and train it with the keywords and synonyms around that topic.

E.g. "What's my current account balance", "How much money do I have on my account", "Am I broke?", etc.

You can check in the search bar for a specific sentence you added prior. Just type in the sentence you are looking for and it will pop up in the user expressions.

Step 3

From here, you can either add more intents based on your use case or go ahead and build out your flow.

For more information on how to create your first conversational flow, click here.

Export an Intent

You can export an intent by clicking on the little export symbol on the right of the intent. This will export a CSV file containing all intent expressions.

Import an Intent

When in the intent window, click 'Import Intent' on the top right.

The AI Studio will prompt you to select the relevant file from your device. This has to be a previously downloaded intent file from a different agent. The name of your file will be the name of the intent.

If needed, you can always make changes to the intent. Don't forget to hit "save" once you're done adding new expressions.

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