Recognizing intents from user input

A voice assistant evolves around intent recognition. Intent recognition tries to extract the user's intent from their input. This intent, a data format, will then be executed by Home Assistant.

Home Assistant's intent recognition is powered by hassil. Hassil recognizes intents by matching the user input against sentence templates.

A sentence template is a sentence that contains slots, placeholders for data, and supports various syntax to allow a single template match a wide range of similar sentences.

(turn | switch) on [the] {area} lights

This example sentence template matches both turn on kitchen lights and switch on the kitchen lights. In both cases it will extract extra data area set to kitchen.

In Home Assistant we are collecting our sentence templates on GitHub. The repository aims to contain for each language and each supported intent in Home Assistant, the possible sentences a user might say.