What are content entities?

Content entities are RegEx and lists we create to validate and sanitize visitor input such as email, ID number, IBAN and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Its academic name is Named Entity Recognition (NER), also known as entity identification or entity extraction. NER is an information extraction technique that automatically identifies named entities in a text and classifies them into predefined categories. Entities can be: names of people, organizations, locations, times, quantities, monetary values, percentages, and more.

When to use content entities?

• When there's PII that needs to be sanitized before importing data import and launching the bot
• When you want to verify or fetch a certain piece of information, e.g. order number, in user messages to create customized dialogue flows

How does it work?

Once an entity is added in Settings > Content Entities, anything in chat visitor messages that match the entity pattern will be identified. 

For example, you can mask any email with the placeholder <EMAIL> by adding this as a content entity in our Dashboard. And if you want to sanitize the entity, simply check the box and the underlying data/string will be redacted and it will not be stored in our database. The sanitization is applied according to GDPR compliancy to sanitize any PII data.

How to set it up?

To setup content entities:

1. Go to Settings > Content Entities
2. Click Add Preset or + New Entity
   • Add Preset - The common ones we create for you: email, credit_card, iban, and personal_identity_code of different countries.
   • + New Entity - Add your own set of rules 

For more details, read how to create content entities.