Entities

When users type their query and ask the bot to complete a task for them, the bot would require some additional information to provide the required solution. This information could be user-specific data like personal details, etc. This information might also need to be stored in the bot or sent to the backend APIs to fetch user-specific data.

For example, when the user texts "I want to book a flight to New York next week", the user has provided the destination city within their message. The bot can extract and store this information.

These variables which help us to store these values are called “entities”. 

Entities can be used when you want to ask certain information to the user in the user journey on the bot. 

Along with extracting keywords from the user's messages, entities can also be asked directly to the user such as their name, email address, phone number, and so on.

There are two types of entities -

• Public entity - Most commonly used entities such as name, email, phone number, etc. These are publically available. You can learn more about it here. 
• Local entity - These are Use case-specific entities such as order id, and transaction id. You can create these and customize it as per your requirements. You can read more about it here. 

You can create public or local entities to suit your needs.

You can check this article to learn more about adding an Entity. 

How does using an entity affect the other Bot Responses?

The flow of Bot responses goes from top to bottom in terms of evaluation. The order of the entities and their order relative to Bot Responses inputs, matters. First, the initial bot reply comes, then the entities, and then finally the final bot reply. The delayed message is sent only after a certain level of inactivity. The initial/final bot replies might be not needed in some scenarios. Note that to change the order of the Bot Responses inputs, simply click and drag the reorder handle.