How to use custom entities

Use custom entities in Bold360 AI to gather information from your customers and use it to offer a personalized experience.

Make sure your widget is set to conversational. Learn more here.

You can also use custom entities as an auxiliary for API-based data source entities as they help collect the information required for the API and then trigger the API itself.

Instead of asking your customers to fill in a form, you can create a conversation to gather information about the customer. For example, you can set up a custom entity that asks for the customer's name and then include their name in articles. Here's how to do that:

  1. In the AI Console, go to Knowledge > Entities.
  2. Choose (Create Entity) in the top right to create a new entity.
  3. Select custom entity for entity type.
  4. Provide a name and optionally a description for your entity.

    The entity name can contain letters, numbers and underscores. Spaces are not allowed.

    You can use the description to give your entity a more meaningful name or description that helps you identify it later.

    Example: Name your entity UserDetails.

  5. Set the life cycle of the entity to Persistent.

    This way, the bot does not forget the user?s first name once they enter one.

    You can also a set a life cycle for the individual properties keeping in mind their life cycle can't be longer than the life cycle of the entire entity. See this article to learn more about how the different life cycle options work.

  6. Fill out the entities table.

    Example:

    Table 1. Property asking for customer's name
    Name Detect Bot Query ErrorMessage Life Cycle
    FirstName Text Hi, I'm your virtual assistant. What's your first name? N/A Persistent
    Note: Since it's not possible to validate text-type custom entity properties, you can't enable error messages for such properties.

    To learn more about the property options for custom entities, see this article.

  7. Save your changes.
  8. Now go to Knowledge > Articles.
  9. Create a new article or open an existing one and add the entity in the article's body.

    Example: Intent: I want to go to Greece for a vacation

    Body: ?Here are our current offers for you, [[UserDetails.FirstName]]:?

    <add options to the article>

  10. Publish the article.

When an article that uses the UserDetails entity is returned as a response, first the entity question is presented then the article is presented with the name they provided. If the conversation continues and the another article with this entity is returned as a response, the bot won't ask the question again, because the customer name is retained for the duration of the session, as defined by the persistent life cycle option.