What are entities?

Entities in Bold360 AI enable you to turn your data into smart chatbot conversations.

Tip: Check out this video to see entity configuration in action.

Entities serve as a database for the information that the conversational bot needs to answer your customers' questions. You set up an entity with a data source and provide different questions the conversational bot will ask the customer about the same set of data. For example, you have a data source for mobile phones and you want to create a conversational bot that recommends your customers the best mobile devices based on their needs. Your data source contains information about the brand, the model, the price, the screen size and so on of the mobile phones available. In the entity, you can set up questions about these bits of information, like Any specific brand you're looking for? and What is the price range?. The customer answers these questions and the conversational bot provides the best fit or fits based on their answers.

With entities, you can provide a smart conversational experience to your customers:

  • If the customer provides an answer to a question that the conversational bot hasn't asked yet, it won't ask that question. For example, if someone is looking for an iPhone with 64GB memory, the bot will skip the question about memory type and potentially the one about phone type as well.
  • The conversational bot presents the questions in the most effective way to ensure the customer has to provide the least number of answers to find the result. So regardless of the order of the questions in the entity, the conversational bot rearranges the questions in the most logical way.
  • When a question has one answer only, the bot simply skips that question and does not present it to the customer. For example, if there is only one Samsung phone with a 7" screen, the bot doesn't ask the customer about either the camera or the memory of the phone, but displays the result immediately.

Bold360 AI supports the following types of entities:

  • Data source entities where the data comes from
    • a CSV or a JSON file or
    • an external data source through an API
  • Custom entities that you can use
    • to collect information from your customers in an interactive way
    • an auxiliary for API-based data source entities as they help collect the information required for the API and then trigger the API itself