Identify date from user utterance

Hi there,

I am trying to identify date from user utterance.
User can enter date in any way he prefers, we are not hard-coding the way for asking for date in utterace.
e.g.; user can enter date like -
this month
last month
10th March, 2019
yesterday
prior quarter

Any suggestions/approach to do that?
Is it possible to integrate external JS libraries (providing NLP for date identification) with Bot Builder and use it there?

Regards,
Neha Sheikh

Hi @nehamsheikh,

Kindly let us know if you have tried with the “Entity node” of type “Date”. This would automatically recognize the date inputs given by the user in any random pattern as listed by you above.

You can train the bot with necessary patterns to identify the date from the initial user utterance.

Let us know if you need any further clarification from the above.

Regards,
Yoga Ramya.

Hi,

Entity type date doesn’t support all inputs for date. You can try sample utterances as mentioned above.
I have tried that already.

Can you please elaborate more on what all user inputs for date be handled by entity with type date?

Thanks,
Neha Sheikh

Neha,

The date entity is fairly comprehensive in what it supports and we aim to support all possibilities. So “yesterday” and “10th March, 2019” both work for me.

The other samples you quoted don’t generate a date because by themselves they don’t really mean anything specific. What date would you expect if someone just said “this month”?

But if you said “10th (of) this month”, then the platform has a day and a month to go on.

Note that those other samples can get detected as date periods too. So for example “this month” will return an object with two properties for the first day and last day of the current month.

Hi Neha,

Adding to the response from Andy, we have posted the date formats with examples in the documentation under the date type of the Entity node.
https://developer.kore.ai/docs/bots/bot-builder/develop/dialog-tasks/working-with-the-entity-node/entity-types/

Let us know if you need any further explanation on the above.

Regards,
Yoga Ramya.

Wow…thanks for updating documentation! :slight_smile:
Will let you know in case anything is required.

Thanks,
Neha Sheikh