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 Chatbot identify keywords within a phrase and provide context-relevant and useful answers to the visitor.  

A Chatbot for travel information may want to use entities to collect locations and dates. For example, "I want to fly from London to New York on June 15th", we would tag "London" and "New York" as city entities, and "June 15th" as a date entity.

Marking word(s) as Entity 

To mark a keyword as an entity, you will need to label entity information in the intents' question variants.  

To label keywords as an Entity in a question, follow these steps: 

1. Log in to the Comm100 Control Panel. 
2. From the left navigation bar, go to Bot > Chatbot > Custom Answers -> Intents.
3. On the Intents page, go to an existing intent or click New Intent if you want to mark words as entities while creating a new Intent. 
4. In the Questions section of intent, add questions, and then select the part of the question you want to mark as an Entity. 
5. In the Select entity drop-down list, create a New Entity or choose from the available System Entity. 

For example, London and New York are keywords and can be labeled as Entities "From-City" and "To-City" in a question variant of an Intent. 

When the visitor asks the Chatbot to book a flight ticket from London to New York, the Chatbot recognizes "London" as the value of the "From-City" and "New York" as the value of "To-City."  

Recognizing these values helps the Chatbot provide a context-relevant answer to the visitor.

Entity Label 

Entity Label is used to label the same entities with different purposes.  

For example, a visitor is looking to book a ticket and provides the From-City and To-City. Both are city Entities. However, they serve different purposes. So, we will need Entity Label to differentiate them.

Use an Entity value 

Once an Entity is marked, its value can be collected using Forms, Prompts, Dynamic Info, and Webhook in the Chatbot Answers.  

For example, you can use Entities From-City and To-City as Dynamic Info in the Chatbot's answer. 

The Chatbot returns the following response.

By using Entities in Forms, and Prompts, the Chatbot will always collect the exact Entity information it needs to give the right information or perform the right actions.