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How to create & manage intents
How to create & manage intents

Learn how to create and manage intents with optional agentic routing to trigger flows in your AI Assistant

Alvaro Vargas avatar
Written by Alvaro Vargas
Updated over 3 weeks ago

Understanding Intent Options

Frontline's Intent feature enables you to create flexible, non-linear conversation paths within your assistant. You can now choose between traditional intent matching or enhanced agentic routing when configuring your intents.

Traditional Intent Matching

Intents represent specific user goals or purposes when interacting with your AI Assistant. For example, in the phrase "Where is my order", the intent is the user's wish to track their order status.

Agentic Routing

Agentic routing is an advanced feature that can be enabled within any intent node. When enabled, your AI Assistant will intelligently analyze user messages based on context, not just predefined intents. This provides more natural and flexible conversation handling while still maintaining the organized structure of your flows.

Adding an intent

Step 1.

Navigate to the assistant > flows > intents and click on create intent

Step 2.

When adding an intent, users should complete the following fields:

  • Name (friendly and descriptive name)

  • Description (optional)

  • Utterances

How utterances work

Utterances are example phrases that users might say or type to trigger a specific intent match. They represent diverse ways users might express the same underlying intention. For instance, for the intent "Where is my order", utterances could include:

  • "What's the status of my order?"

  • "Can you track my package?"

  • "When will my order arrive?"

  • "I need to find my order"

The more varied and comprehensive the utterances linked to an intent, the better the Frontline AI Assistant can recognize and interpret user intentions. This recognition is quantified as a confidence score for each intent.

Adding and Managing Utterances:

Manual Addition: Type an example phrase in the input field and press enter to add it as an utterance.

AI-Powered Generation: Use the "Generate" button to create utterances automatically. This feature combines data from the Intent Name, Description, existing utterances (if any), and any example phrases in the input field to produce relevant variations.

Deletion: Remove unwanted utterances by clicking the "-" icon next to each one.

Best Practices:

Include a mix of short and long phrases

Consider common misspellings or grammatical errors users might make

Incorporate synonyms and different word orders

Reflect various user demographics and speaking styles

Regularly reviewing and updating your utterances can significantly improve your AI assistant's understanding and response accuracy over time.

Step 3.

To integrate an intent into your conversation flow:

  1. Navigate to Your Assistant:

    • Go to Assistant > Flows > Flows section

  2. Create or Edit a Flow:

    • Either create a new flow or select an existing one to edit

  3. Access the Designer:

    • Open the flow to enter the Designer interface

  4. Add the Intent Node:

    • Drag and drop an Intent node from the left menu onto your canvas

    • You can configure both traditional intent matching or agentic routing based on your needs. It can be either both, or one or the other.

    • Connect the node to your desired conversation paths

Pro Tips

  • Use traditional intent matching when you need precise control over specific user requests

  • Enable agentic routing for more natural, conversation-like interactions

  • You can use both methods in different intents within the same assistant

  • Regularly review your routing performance and adjust configurations as needed

  • Test your flows thoroughly to ensure smooth transitions users.

Deleting an intent

To remove an intent from your assistant:

  1. Go to Assistant > Flows > Flows section

  2. Find the intent you want to delete:

    1. Scroll through the list, or

    2. Use the search box

  3. Click the three dots (...) to the right of the intent

  4. Select "Delete" from the dropdown menu

  5. Confirm the deletion if prompted

Note: Deleting an intent is permanent. Ensure it's not used in any active flows before removing.

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