In chatbot development, you will find many new concepts that is pretty foreign to IT. One of the concept I encountered in Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is utterances and intent. For bot developer, NLP is essential for a good design.
Intents are comprised of permutations of typical user requests and statements, which are also referred to as utterances.
Docs Oracle
Building up your Utterances
Utterances will need time and effort to gain a rich set. This is to handle ambiguous user input that really meant the same time. E.g. “I wan to find my order” or “check my booking” will be the same thing but expressed differently. You may want to consider having engaging diverse group of users if your Chatbot is used in these locations.
Train and Test
ODA provide a feature to train and test your intents. This concept will be similar for all bot i.e. the ability to learn from a seeding set of utterances. Be prepared because you will need a lot of man hours to achieve a steady set of intents and utterances. Thus, you will need to setup your test cases and automate your test runs.
Chatbot development is about NLP and a lot of testing. Intents and utterances are some of new concepts in ODA. It is likely that similar concepts can be found in all Chatbot platform for configuring your bot and NLP.
Danny Kwok 