Intent User Guide

IIUSA Intent Editor User Guide

An intent is an action that a chatbot user wants to perform: book a flight, order a pizza, get assistance with a task. Intents are used pervasively in user input processing for chatbots and in natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

We created an intent editor that you are free to download but you need to know how to run Python programs:

Python Intent

The first column indicates the short name of the intent (no spaces). The second column is the question a user could ask a chat bot. The third column represents responses.

The intents are in JSON format, and the syntax is hidden from users, but this is what it looks like to coders:

{
“intents”: [
  {
    “tag”: “name”,
    “patterns”: [
       “what’s your name?”,
       “what is your name”,
       “what are you called?”,
       “who are you?”
    ],
    “responses”: [
       “My name is Reddy”,
       “I’m Reddy”,
       “I am Reddy”,
       “My name is Reddy”
    ]
   },
   {
    “tag”: “ruhuman”,
    “patterns”: [
       “Are you real?”,
       “Are you human”,
       “Are you a robot?”,
       “Are you a machine?”
   ],
   “responses”: [
       “I am as real as Data gets.”,
       “I am kinda “choose your own adventure.””,
       “I aim to be.”
   ]
   },
   {
    “tag”: “time”,
    “patterns”: [
       “What time is it?”,
       “Do you know the time?”,
       “Do you have the time?”
   ],
    “responses”: [
       “Check your monitor.”,
       “It’s the same time as it was yesterday at this time.”,
       “All time is relative.”
   ]
  }
]
}

IIUSA Intent Editor v0.4

9 Sep 2021

The IIUSA-intent-editor icon should be double-clickable, but you can also start it from the command line. From a terminal window, start the program with: python IIUSA-intent-editor.py

By default, the editor loads intents.json. You can load another file and save your changes through the File menu.

After the default file loads, start by selecting an intent from the Intent dropdown. Then move to the Patterns and Responses dropdowns to view the existing patterns and responses.

Use the three textboxes and the three Add buttons to add intents, patterns, and responses. Use the three Delete buttons to delete intents, patterns, and responses.

Currently there is no Edit function: if you want to change a pattern or response, you will have to add the new one and delete the old.