Introduction 

Entities are pieces of information that provide more context to an intent. They might be times, dates, locations, people, or other pieces of information that adjust the intent to a visitor’s specific needs.  

Adding entities to intents helps the bot identify keywords within a phrase and provide answers that are context-relevant and useful to the user. 

A chatbot for travel information may want to use entities to collect locations and dates. For example, “I want to fly from Barcelona to Madrid on June 15th", we would tag “Barcelona” and “Madrid” as location entities, and “June 15th" as a date entity. 

Benefits of using entities 

The prime benefits of using entities are: 

• They provide more context to intents. 
• They help the bot to give the right actions or information to answer the visitor’s question.  
• To add synonyms to keywords 
• To add business-specific jargon to the chatbot 
• While some intents can be satisfied without the need of entities, in some cases, the bot needs to know entity information to provide answers that are useful to the visitor. 

Creating new entities 

Identify the intents which may need entities, and create new entities for anything that is not available in the prebuild entities list.  

For example, pizza can have several flavors, and each flavor can have synonyms.  

 To create a new entity, follow these steps:  

1. Log in to the Comm100 account. 
2. In the top navigation bar, click the Bot tab.   
3. From the left menu, go to AI Chatbots > Entities.  
4. Click New Entity.   
5. On the New Entity page, type a name of an entity.  
   Note: Do not use spaces in entity names.  
6. Click the Add a Keyword link.  
7. On the New Keyword pop-up, do the following: 
   1. Type a keyword. 
   2. Click the Add a Synonym link.
   3. Type a synonym.
      Note: Synonyms allow your bot to recognize different variations of the same entity. 
   4. Click OK. 
      A new keyword entry is displayed in the keyword list area.  
8. Click Save.   

Prebuilt entities  

Comm100 provides 26 prebuilt entities. All prebuilt entities have prefix “sys” in the entity index. They include widely used values like temperature, date, distance, time, monetary amounts, weight, and dimensions. 

Working with entities 

To let the bot use the available entities, label entity information in the question variants of intents. To label keywords in a question, select the words, and map them to entities. 

For example - An entity used while adding questions in intents. 

Chicago and London are keywords and are labeled as prebuilt entity sys-geo-city. You can use Entity Labels to label the same entities with a different purpose. 

For example - To book a flight, you label both from and to locations as entities, and you can use Entity Label to differentiate them.  

To collect the entity information, you can use forms and prompts.  

Importing entities  

If you have existing entities already set up, you can import them into your bot. Comm100 provides import templates to help with this. 

Note: Importing entities overwrites all the existing entity data if you have Entities with the same names. 

To import entities, follow these steps: 

1. Log in to the Comm100 account. 
2. In the top navigation bar, click the Bot tab.  
3. From the left menu, go to AI Chatbots > Entities. 
4. Click Import. 
   The Import Entities page displays with the file format, maximum file size, and maximum entities supported for import. 
5. Click the Download Template link. 
   The spreadsheet file is saved on your local file system. It contains the templates: Entity Name, Keywords, and Synonyms.  
6. Update the template file with entity information.  
7. Click the Upload link. 
8. Click Import.