Defining Intent Phrases


You or other users in your organization can interact with Mobile Voice using intent phrases that are defined for each content item. Items that can have intent phrases set to them are items that can be run, such as reports, HTML files, URLs, and so on. These phrases, such as “Tell me the highest grossing sales region in 2017” provide an “intent” or pre-defined criteria that can be used to learn more about the data that is available to you.

Intent phrases will vary greatly, and should be defined using the available data in your repository. When setting up these phrases, some questions you can ask are:

  • Who will be searching for this data?
  • What data elements are in this content?
  • What information is searched for regularly?
  • What data elements are indexed?
  • Should the reports be run visually, or should the result be returned verbally?
  • Does the user know exactly what parameters to search for?

Questions such as these will help you determine the most helpful phrases for your search. Also, consider wording your phrases in such a way where the action taken by WebFOCUS is obvious directly from the phrase. For example, starting a phrase with “Show me” will result in WebFOCUS running a report, whereas starting one with “Tell me” will produce a verbal result.

When constructing intent phrases, it is best to avoid using words with similar pronunciation, such as “two”, “too”, or “to”, as well as incorporating special characters, such as * or + into your query. Using these words may produce mixed results with the voice API, and your intent phrase may not be found correctly. When speaking your intent phrases, remember to speak in a normal, conversational pace, in order to ensure that the API properly understands you.

Let’s take the report we have been working with and apply some of the questions above. While reviewing the following report:

Sample report

We can start to see that some helpful, general phrases could be:

  • What were all store sales.
  • Tell me the revenue.
  • Show me store inventory.
  • Tell me product sales.

While the phrases listed above are useful for obtaining general report information, or initiating an interactive exchange with WebFOCUS using required parameters, you can word your phrases to give you specific information in one sentence. For example, let’s say you want to know product sales for televisions, regardless of city. As long as Product Category is indexed, every data value for that dimension can be searched for using a phrase constructed in the following way:

Show me product sales for televisions

In this example, the intent phrase is “Show me product sales” and the parameter is “televisions”. When using intent phrases, anything that comes after the word “for” will automatically be viewed by WebFOCUS as a parameter, since it separates the intent phrase from the variable found in the procedure. (Due to this, the word “for” should not be included in a saved intent phrase.) In this case, adding the words for televisions will result in WebFOCUS loading the following report:

Sample report

You define intent phrases from the WebFOCUS Home Page that is accessed in a Web browser on your desktop. Right-click a report or chart in your repository, click Properties, and then click the Advanced tab, as shown in the following image.

Advanced tab

Note: You cannot add intent phrases to My Content items.

Under Search Properties, in the Intent Phrases setting, type an intent phrase for your content. You can add phrases such as “What was gross profit”, as shown in the following image..

Search properties

Once you have defined your intent phrases, you must save them. Click Save.

You may enter as many intent phrases per content item as you need, and punctuation is not necessary. When entering multiple intent phrases, use a semicolon (;) to separate them. The Intent Phrases box allows a maximum of 1040 characters.

Once you define intent phrases, the What can I ask? button becomes available in the Ask WebFOCUS interface. Once you click the What can I ask? button, all of the available intent phrases will display alphabetically, as shown in the following image.

Request phrases

Content items with multiple intent phrases will be shown in one tile, and each phrase is separated by a semicolon (;), as shown in the following image.

Multiple request phrases

Clicking any one of these tiles will run the intent phrase and begin the interaction with WebFOCUS, as shown in the following image..

Tip: You can easily find the content associated with a particular intent phrase by right-clicking the intent phrase tile on the Ask WebFOCUS user interface and clicking Open item location.

Open item location

The content item associated to that intent phrase will be highlighted.

Your content is now ready to use with WebFOCUS Mobile Voice. You can access the Ask WebFOCUS user interface, and begin interacting with your content yourself, or share this access with others in your organization.