An intent is what an end user can ask an agent. Booking a hotel room is an intent; another intent is the consultation of lunch hours, or the cancellation of a reservation that is already made.

Understanding what the user's request is is the intelligent part of the agent because there are many ways in which a request can be expressed in natural language, that is, what we humans talk about.

The agent will try to interpret the user's request by identifying the closest intent. Naturally, the association is not always precise; in fact a ranking of possible interpretations is returned. But, from this point of view, we can improve the answers by providing more alternative examples of the same requests. Also it is possible to apply machine learning algorithms in order to learn from the previous answers.