What are entities and how to use them

Welcome to the fifth lesson of our Dialogflow series! In this tutorial, we will be learning about Entities in Dialogflow and how you can use them to extract information from user inputs and store them in variables in Landbot. Entities are variables where information from user inputs is stored, making it easier to use that data in a CRM or booking system.

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We will use the example of a restaurant reservation to demonstrate how to extract information using Entities. For instance, if a user requests a reservation for two people on Friday 14th, we will store "2" as the number of people and "Friday 14th" as the reservation date. This data, which will be captured in Dialogflow as Entities, can then be stored in Landbot variables for later use.

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To start, we will create an intent in Dialogflow for users interested in making a reservation. We will call it "reservation.trigger" and add common sentences from previous lessons to create a set of possible user inputs. We will then add these sentences one by one, and Dialogflow will highlight the entities in each sentence.

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We will also cover the two types of entities in Dialogflow: System entities and Custom Entities. System entities are default Dialogflow entities that are quick and ready to use, while Custom Entities are useful for specific names or keywords that Dialogflow doesn't recognize by default. In the "Actions and Parameters" section, we will set the parameters as required to ensure that the user provides the necessary information for the reservation. We will also define prompts for each entity to prompt the user to provide the missing information.

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Once the intent is set up, we will move to Landbot and set up the bot to save the Entities from Dialogflow in variables. We will add the parameter name and set the Landbot variable where we want to store the value. And that's it! With this tutorial, you can now use Entities to extract and store user input data, making it easier to use that data in your CRM or booking system. In the next and final lesson of this Dialogflow series, we will learn how to redirect users to different flows depending on their response parameters.