When architecting an intent recognition system, what must a designer first define concerning its capabilities?
The total set of intents the system must recognize (the intent space)
The foundational step in designing any effective intent recognition system is clearly delineating its scope of operation, which is formally known as defining the 'intent space.' This involves establishing an exhaustive list of every goal or action the system is expected to perform, such as defining specific banking intents like 'transfer_funds' or 'check_balance'. Only after this space is established can subsequent steps, like gathering the substantial training data (example utterances) required for each intent, proceed logically. Without a clearly mapped intent space, the system lacks the necessary boundaries to distinguish between valid commands and irrelevant or out-of-scope user input.
