Intent

Intent is the goal a user is trying to achieve in a conversation. 'I want to book a table for 4' → intent: make_reservation. 'When's my order arriving?' → intent: track_order. Classifying intent is the first decision in any conversational system.

In rule-based bots, intents are explicit (you write a classifier per intent). In LLM-based bots, intents are inferred at inference time from the system prompt and few-shot examples.

Good intent design is the difference between a bot that helps and one that frustrates: too few intents and you miss cases; too many and accuracy drops.