What are content entities

Content entities, also known as named entities, are pieces of information in visitor messages that our product gives specific meaning to. For example, understanding that a certain 14-digit combination of letters and numbers is an order number; or, that another combination of numbers, letters, and special characters is an email. These pieces of information will then be saved to the session of the conversation and be available for use at a later stage.

The whole process of identifying information is called Named Entity Recognition (NER).

Types of content entities

At Ultimate, we use three types of content entities:

1. Regular Expression (also known as Regex)
2. Expression List
3. Synonym List

Regular Expression (Regex)

• All number or pattern-based entities, such as credit cards, IBANs, emails, phone numbers, order numbers, Dates, Social Security Numbers, etc. 

• Every Ultimate bot comes with the presets below:

  • IBANs

  • Emails

  • Credit cards

  • US Social Security Number

  • Personal identity code (Austrian, Chilean, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss)

Expression List

• List entities like countries, cities, brands, etc.

Synonym List

• Product Type - shoes, shirts, pants, accessories, etc.

• Product color - white, black, green, blue, etc.

When to use content entities

• When there's Personal Identification Information (PII) that needs to be sanitized before data import 
• When you want to collect and verify a certain piece of information. For example, order number, in chat visitor messages in order to create customized dialogue flows
• When you want to understand and identify product specific descriptions in chat visitor messages

How it works

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.