Managing Entities

Managing Entities, Entity Type, Properties & Slots in the Model Manager / NLU Model

To view your assistant's entities, navigate to the Entities tab in the Model Manager.

Creating Entitites

To create a New Entity, hit the + icon in the Search Entities bar. You’ll see a New Entity creation screen that’s ready to be populated.

When creating a new entity, you’ll need to enter:

• Entity Name - you will notice the curly-braced {} in a colored box populate as you input a name; this will be how you invoke/input the entity in Intent utterances or any other applicable part of your assistant
• Entity Type - the type of data the entity is capturing
• Entity Values - its potential values (available when using Custom Entities)
• Entity Synonyms (optional) - the alternative slot values/variations of the entity values that can classify the Entity slot
• Entity Color - this does not affect your end-user experience, it helps organize your Model Manager experience

Entity Type

Entity types indicate the type of data the entity is capturing. Depending on your assistant type, you will notice a dropdown of various entity types available for your building experience.

In Voiceflow, there are two ways to categorize entities:

Custom Entities: These are the entities that can be defined by the conversation designer as per their use case.

System-Defined Entities: The system entities are commonly used entities that are pre-defined in the system, dependant on channel/assistant-type.

Channels like Alexa may have existing-defined Entity types like "FirstName". These channel-specific and/or assistant-type entities will have thousands of built-in examples - saves you from having to enter thousands of names.

Custom Entities

If there isn't an existing built-in Entity type for your use case, you will have to build a Custom Entity type. When building a Custom Entity type, you will manually or bulk-import the values you want your Entities to be able to capture.

Entity Synonyms

Entity synonyms let you enter variations of what a user could say to incite the value of a particular Entity.

Bulk Import Entities

Similarly to bulk importing Intent utterances, you are also able to bulk-import Entities and its synonyms.

You can also do so by clicking the cloud icon next to the Entity Type. You can also import your data via the in-line editor or as a (.csv) file.