Utterance

An intent is what a customer is actually trying to do, inferred from what they wrote or said rather than from the specific words used. Two very different messages can share an intent, which is why routing and automation are built on intent rather than on keyword matching.

Entity extraction is the process of pulling structured values — an order number, an IBAN, a product name, a date — out of a customer’s free-text message. Reliable extraction is what allows an automated agent to act inside a business system rather than only classify the request.

An evaluation set is a fixed sample of real conversations used to score an AI agent’s quality before and after changes. Holding the sample constant is what makes results comparable, so evaluation sets are versioned and refreshed only deliberately when the underlying contact mix genuinely shifts.

A verbatim is a customer’s exact words, kept unedited as evidence in voice-of-customer reporting. Verbatims carry the specificity that aggregate scores strip out, which is why they persuade product and executive audiences when a percentage change on a dashboard cannot do so on its own.