Multiple intents handling approach - email parsing

Question

My bot reads and replies in simple mail conversation. More like in chat manner, one or 2 sentences only done through email. My backend is taking care of reading emails, interpreting api.ai responses, storing locally useful data and sending next questions. Before sending to api.ai, messages are split in sentences.

What I've seen from example conversations already done by humans is that the end users are quite often sending several significant information in one sentence. That means that from e.g. 8 possible peaces of information I totally can have (mostly non required) I can get in one sentence any 2 of them.

How to organize that?

I started with one intent for each field I require. But to solve case with any two intents in one sentence, I am extending user says examples with other field too. At the end I will have 8 intents which are actually filled with similar examples.
Now I am thinking to have just one intent and cover all in it. That might work, but the real question is that really way to do it?

Here are example conversations to describe issue better

v1 - simple way like in api.ai examples
- u: Hi. I need notebook bellow $700.
- b: Great. What size should it be?
- u: 17'
- b: I have gaming one at $590 and one professional for $650.
- u: I more to gaming one.

v2 - what I can expect from real life examples
- u: Hi I would like to buy 15 inch gaming laptop.
- great, what price range?
- ...

Answer 1

Api.ai has a feature called slot filling that allows to collect parameter values within a single intent. It's great for building conversational interfaces. You can see if it's compatible with you use case.

Here's how such intent could look like for the examples you provided:

See the "book_notebook" intent:

and how it would work in conversation:

See a test for the "book_notebook" intent: