---
schema_version: "1"
id: e0ebec4be203c21b1b7b9f09454e3a52402769b7058be312065613a03d725f26
title: What Makes Bots Tick?
collection: admin
version: current
locale: en-us
portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/admin/current/en-us/service/264-0-0/bots_service_terminology.md
canonical_url: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_terminology.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5
source_site: help.salesforce.com
content_type: documentation
content_hash: d56f9a5e7466790ea848640413b9ead8208ce6cbba404033b7d20cd1a5afd9e9
description: Bots have many moving parts. But let’s start with a few fundamental components in Einstein Bots.
products:
  - Service Cloud
  - Service Intelligence
release: "264"
---
# What Makes Bots Tick?

Bots have many moving parts. But let’s start with a few fundamental components in Einstein Bots.

### Required Editions

<table class="slds-table slds-table_bordered slds-max-medium-table_stacked slds-m-bottom_small edition"><colgroup><col></colgroup><tbody><tr class=""><td class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;"><a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.einstein_service_intro.htm&amp;language=en_US" target="_blank">View supported editions</a>.</td></tr></tbody></table>

![Note](https://sf-zdocs-cdn-prod.zoominsoftware.com/tdta-service-support_intelligence-264-0-0-production-enus/dcd06a7b-b5ab-448b-a767-4e2e90481508/images/icon_note.png)

Note Starting August 17, 2026, Einstein Bots is in Maintenance Mode. Existing Einstein Bots continue to be supported and can be used after August 17, 2026. However, no new features or enhancements will be added, and we recommend using Agentforce for new AI agent implementations. See [Upgrade Bots to Service Agent](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_asa_create.htm&type=5&language=en_US) and [Learn about Agentforce](https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/trails/design-and-implement-ai-agents-with-agentforce).

<table class="slds-table slds-table_bordered slds-max-medium-table_stacked slds-m-bottom_small ">
      <colgroup>
        <col style="width:33.33333333333333%">
        <col style="width:33.33333333333333%">
        <col style="width:33.33333333333333%">
      </colgroup>
      <thead class="slds-text-title_caps ">
        <tr class="">
          <th scope="col" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" id="d33768e68">Einstein Bot Component</th>
          <th scope="col" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" id="d33768e71">Description</th>
          <th scope="col" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" id="d33768e74">Example</th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">
            <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_dialog_about.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="A dialog is the workhorse of your bot’s interaction with your customer.">Dialog</a>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">Dialogs are conversation snippets that control what your bot can do. You can associate
            every dialog with a dialog intent, which can be trained to understand variations in customer
            input. During a conversation with a customer, your bot moves between several different
            dialogs. Each dialog handles a portion of the conversation. For example, Welcome, Main Menu,
            Order Status, Location and Hours, and Transfer to Agent are individual dialogs that a
            customer can experience as part of a single conversation with your bot.</td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">
            <p>A dialog for “Chat with an agent”...</p>
            <p>Customer: “Transfer me to an agent.” [or any variations on this phrase]</p>
            <p style="margin-bottom:0;">Bot: “No problem. Hang on: I’ll connect you with an agent.”</p>
          </td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">
            <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_add_entity.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="Create custom entities to gather information that matches a regex pattern or list of synonym values.">Entity</a>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">An entity represents a type of data that you want to collect from a customer. We
            provide the following system entities: Boolean, Currency, Date, DateTime, Email Address,
            Number, Object (standard or custom), Phone Number, and Text. You can create your own custom
            entities as needed.</td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">
            <p>Order number</p>
            <p style="margin-bottom:0;">Email address</p>
          </td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">
            <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_train_bot.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) through intent management is uncharted territory for most admins. It’s important to remember that building bots is iterative - starting off with a small bot and then building it into a complex machine is part of the journey. As you gain feedback from your customers and review data, your bots grow in ways you have never expected!">Intent</a>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">
            <p>Intents are the customer's reasons for interacting with your bot. For example, booking
              a flight, changing a flight, getting store hours. Associate intents with your dialogs. Then
              <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_intent_training.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="Help your bot improve its conversation quality with Bot Training. Bot Training, shows you the intent that the bot identified from an utterance. Then you can tell your bot if it was right, or you can correct the bot if it was wrong.">train the bot</a> to create an intent model
              that your bot can use to understand intents. If your customers interact with your bot by
              typing a message in the chat window, use intents to help your bot understand what they
              want.
            </p>
            <p style="margin-bottom:0;">If your customers interact with your bot using only menus or buttons, rather than
              free-form text input, intents aren’t needed.</p>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">Customer: Where’s my order?</td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">
            <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_whats_an_entity.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="An entity represents a type of data that you want to collect from a customer. We provide the following system entities: Boolean, Currency, Date, DateTime, Email Address, Number, Object (standard or custom), Phone Number, and Text.">Named Entity Recognition
              (NER)</a>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">NER identifies data inside of bot conversations (in other words, an entity) and
            maintains the format of that data, so that the data is recognizable and usable across
            Einstein Bots.</td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">
            <p>Customer: I need to fly to SFO next week. </p>
            <p style="margin-bottom:0;">NER: Extracts “SFO” as an airport code and “next week” as a date. </p>
          </td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">Natural Language Processing (NLP)</td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">NLP is how your bot processes the free text that your customers enter into your bot.
            NLP combines ideas and methods from computer science, linguistics, and AI to train your bot
            to identify the literal, grammatical, and contextual meanings of your customers’
            inputs.</td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">&nbsp;</td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">Natural Language Understanding (NLU)</td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">NLU is a substep of NLP that uses the free text your customers enter into your bot to
            help your bot decide what action to take. In other words, it uses customer inputs to identify
            an intent, which tells your bot to perform a useful task for your customer.</td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">
            <p>Start an action, such as look up an existing case</p>
            <p style="margin-bottom:0;"> Transfer to an agent </p>
          </td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">
            <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_intent_data.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="Bots have two sets of data: the data around events and the data around intents. Event data refers to the things that happen inside bot conversations. Intent data refers to the data used to train the model so your bot understands your customers. To create a robust bot, you must have a strategy for handling both data sets.">Utterance</a>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">
            <p>Utterances are common conversational phrases that represent the ways your customers
              describe an intent. Utterances are the building blocks of intent models, which is why
              they’re sometimes referred to as intent data. A single intent contains many utterances,
              because there are many ways to describe the same intent.</p>
            <p>Utterances are instances of customer inputs. A customer input becomes an utterance when
              it’s classified into an intent, although sometimes these terms are used interchangeably.</p>
            <p style="margin-bottom:0;">You can add utterances to an intent manually, or you can create an <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_intent_sets.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="You can use Einstein Intent Sets to add many utterances to intents at one time. Intent sets can be shared across orgs to quickly assign utterances to intents.">Einstein Intent Set</a> to load many utterances at
              once.</p>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">
            <p>Intent: Transfer to agent</p>
            <p>Utterances:</p>
            <ul>
              <li>I’d like to speak to an agent.</li>

              <li>Can I talk to a person?</li>

              <li>agent</li>

            </ul>
          </td>

        </tr>
        <tr class="">
          <td data-label="Einstein Bot Component" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e68 ">
            <a href="https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.bots_service_add_slot.htm&amp;release=264.0.0&amp;type=5" title="Create custom variables to store information gathered from your customers.">Variable</a>
          </td>

          <td data-label="Description" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e71 ">A variable is a container that stores a specific piece of data collected from the
            customer or output from Salesforce. Since variables are containers of information, they can
            be used within dialog actions as both inputs and outputs and can be inserted as part of the
            text in messages.</td>

          <td data-label="Example" class="slds-cell-wrap" style="vertical-align:top;" headers="d33768e74 ">If your bot books a flight for a customer, you can create the entity, Airport Code,
            with two variables, Departure Airport Code and Arrival Airport Code.</td>

        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>