Intent recognition

The term comes from older voicebots. There, a list of intents with example sentences was created in advance, and a classifier assigned every utterance to one of them. If nothing matched, a follow-up question or a transfer came next. Assistants based on large language models no longer need a fixed list in order to reply.

The assignment remains useful all the same: for transferring to the right team, for rules (“always offer a callback for complaints”) and for analysis. Only when requests are named consistently can you see why people call and which questions the assistant could not answer. A short, stable list of categories makes more sense than a fine-grained structure that nobody maintains.