Glossary

Action

When a user says something, it is converted to intents and entities. Then, the system can take any action in response. Actions can include text-to-speech output, or running a specific command.

For example, if someone asks to pay money off their credit card, then the system should interact with the banking backend to pay the card, while also playing a TTS response to confirm to the user what is happening.

ASR

The first step in any dialogue system is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which converts the audio of someone’s utterance into text. ASR usually outputs in ‘spoken form’, i.e. numbers and other expressions are in words, not digits (“three hundred and twenty one” and not “321”), but automatic formatting can optionally be applied.

Diatheke uses Cobalt’s ASR engine, Cubic, to process audio and supply transcripts.

Command

A command is a specific type of action that executes some set of tasks in response to a recognized intent. For example, if the utterance “Play some music” was recognized as an intent, the command might handle the actual playback of an audio file.

Entity

An entity (a.k.a. a slot) appears in an utterance. It represents a value in an intent that can change between utterances or even be omitted entirely in some cases. Entities are defined in the Diatheke model.

Examples
1. "What's the weather forecast for Paris?"
  1. “Book me three plane tickets from London to New York, please.”

  2. “Play the song New York

  3. “Pay three pounds off my credit card.”

The first two examples have entities that are cities - the first has a single City, while the second might have a SourceCity and DestinationCity.

The second and fourth examples have entities that are numbers, though they are interpreted differently in the two utterances. One is a quantity, and the other is an amount of money.

The same words can mean different entities in different contexts. E.g. ‘New York’ could be either a City or a SongName, depending on the context.

Intent

Intent is the name for a group of utterances which mean the same sort of thing and result in a particular action being taken. Intents are defined as part of the Diatheke model.

Example - GetWeatherForecastIntent
"What's the weather forecast for Paris?"
"What's the weather like in London?"
"Is it going to be sunny today?"
Example - BookTicketIntent
"Book me three plane tickets from London to New York, please."
"Book me two train tickets from Newcastle to Edinburgh."
"Book me five bus tickets to Grand Junction."

NLU

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a field within artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehesion. It attempts to discern the meaning of (sometimes incomplete) sentences. In Diatheke, these interpretations are the intent with its associated entites.

Session

A session represents all the components (ASR, TTS, NLU, etc.) necessary to carry on a conversation with Diatheke. A single session keeps track of a dialog’s current state, with all possible states being defined by a Diatheke model.

Slot

See Entity

TTS

Text To Speech (TTS) synthesizes audio that replicates human speech from written text.

Diatheke uses Cobalt’s TTS engine, Luna, to process audio and supply transcripts.

Utterance

An utterance is something that someone says - it isn’t necessarily a full sentence as people don’t always speak grammatically.

Examples
"What's the weather forecast?"
"Book me a train ticket, please"
"Play some music"
"Pay my credit card balance in full"
"Cancel"