Managing Entities, Entity Values/Slots & Synonyms

How do I manage my conversation entities, slots, synonyms?

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

Creating Entities

To create a New Entity, hit the + icon in the Entities tab. You’ll be prompted to name and fill into the data for a new Entity.

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 or Slots (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. 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.

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

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.