Entities

Entity types are used to control how data from end-user input is extracted.

Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) provides predefined system entities that can match many common types of data. For example, there are system entities for matching dates, times, colors, email addresses, and so on. You can also create your own custom entities for matching custom data. For example, you could define a vegetable entity that can match the types of vegetables available for purchase with a grocery store agent.

Entity terminology

The term entity is used in this documentation and in the Dialogflow CX console to describe the general concept of entities. When discussing entity details, it's important to understand more specific terms:

• Entity type: Defines the type of information you want to extract from user input. For example, vegetable could be the display name of an entity type. Clicking Create from the Entity Types section of the Dialogflow CX console creates an entity type. When using the API, the term entity type refers to the EntityType type. Go to the EntityType API reference

  Select a protocol and version for the EntityType reference:

  Protocol	V3	V3beta1
  REST	EntityType resource	EntityType resource
  RPC	EntityType interface	EntityType interface
  C++	EntityTypesClient	Not available
  C#	EntityTypesClient	Not available
  Go	EntityTypesClient	Not available
  Java	EntityTypesClient	EntityTypesClient
  Node.js	EntityTypesClient	EntityTypesClient
  PHP	Not available	Not available
  Python	EntityTypesClient	EntityTypesClient
  Ruby	Not available	Not available

  Close

• (Optional) Description: Describes the purpose of the entity type, for example "This entity is triggered when the user mentions a vegetable". If you intend to use AI generation to auto-generate reference value synonyms, this field will be used by the model to produce higher-quality results.

• Entity entry: For each entity type, there can be many entity entries. Each entity entry provides a set of words or phrases that are considered equivalent, a reference value in the first column and one or more synonyms to that reference value in the second column. For example, if vegetable is an entity type, you could define these entity entries:

  Reference value	Synonyms
  scallion	scallion, green onion
  bell pepper	bell pepper, sweet pepper
  carrot	carrot
  potato	potato, tater, tuber

  Instead of entering entity entries and synonyms manually, you can select the Auto-generate __ syonyms per entity checkbox when you create a new entity entry. The default value is 3 synonyms. The AI will generate synonyms based on the reference value and entity type description and enter them in the table. Please note that the synonyms list must also include the original reference value in order to produce a match to that value.

  When editing an entity type from the Dialogflow CX console, each row of the display is an entity entry. When using the API, the term entity entry refers to the Entity type (EntityType.Entity or EntityType_Entity for some client library languages).

• Entity reference value and synonyms: Some entity entries have multiple words or phrases that are considered equivalent, like the scallion in previous example. For these entity entries, you provide one reference value and one or more synonyms.