Now campaigns can use artificial intelligence in Ask a Question bot actions to recognize more answers and reply with custom responses. Launch sophisticated, interactive messaging at scale that enhances a member’s experience.

What is Intent Recognition?

AI Intents identify the action or goal of incoming messages from members. Intents in flows expand the ability to understand and categorize the purpose behind a member’s message as they interact with your campaign. By identifying the intent in a message, flows can interpret a member's needs more accurately and respond with relevant information or actions. 

As a type of Ask a Question bot action, intents are designed to ask survey style questions and scan for intents in responses. Unlike Yes/No or multiple choice question types, intents can:

• Recognize misspelled words, i.e. match the misspelled word “Acess"” with the intent “Access"
• Recognize tenses of words, i.e. match the tense “volunteering” with the intent “volunteer”
• Parse for root words in a larger phrase, i.e. match “I want to take action" with the intent “Act"
• Identify words and phrases of similar meaning, i.e. match “I want to donate used jackets and shirts" with the intent “clothing drive"
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When setting up your intent synonyms, you don’t need to account for every possible tense, misspelling, or complex response. Intents make your response matching stronger and more sophisticated, without an exhaustive list of synonyms.

Using AI in flows:

To get started, create a flow and select the Ask a Question bot action. Next, set the question type to Intents.

Next, you’ll want to compose the question that you’d like to send members. Set up a survey style question.

After you set up your question prompt, set up your intents to capture. Draft a list of synonyms for each intent. Intents require at least 5 synonyms so AI has a sufficient subset of terms to compare incoming messages to. In addition to your intents, Strive will recognize if a member replies with an intent synonym or with a similar phrase to an intent synonym.

Important tip: Make sure your intents are distinct from one another. If you have separate intents that are too similar in the same bot action (for example Intent: Monthly Donation vs. Intent: Donation) it may result in inaccurate matching.

Check out our step by step guide for setting up intent bot actions.

Test and train intents in flows:‍

Training your intents will make AI recognition smarter. With the SMS simulator, you can see how intents match with possible incoming messages. If a simulated message doesn't yield the match you want, add it as a synonym to redirect the bot action’s AI. As you train intents, a more comprehensive set of synonyms will emerge.

When should intents be used in a flow?

If you notice your members are responding in a variety of ways to multiple choice questions, resulting in validation failures or more back and forth, consider using an intents question instead. Intents are more sophisticated in understanding your incoming messages and matching them to your response options.  
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Make your flows feel less like bots, by powering your conversations with AI intent recognition. To learn more, schedule a demo