In natural language processing, there is a difference between intents and entities. An intent captures a global meaning of a sentence: its intent, the thing that someone means. An entity, on the other hand, is a single piece of information. Intents might need one or more entities to do their work. Consider the following sentence:
"I want to book a flight tomorrow to New York".
The intent here is "booking" -- someone planning to make a trip. The "booking" intent here has two entities, "tomorrow", which is a point in time, and "New York", which is a location.
As stated, an intent captures a global meaning of a sentence. For instance, the sentences "hello!", "Hi there", "How are you?" can all be seen as utterings of the same intent namely, a greeting.
In Bubblescript, intents are either matched using regular expressions, or using DialogFlow.
Next up: Now that you know what intents are, let's find out how to create and manage them using Botsquad's Intent Manager ».