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I've hit this problem too. I picked Colossal Cave for an example of wrapping Echo around some interactive fiction. It has a command set that has the same "matrix problem" that you talk about. The way I solved this was to define my terms, and then write a program to generate the file. For example, I distilled it down to verbs and object, which can be combined in simple or compound sentences. For now I just define them statically like this: private static final String[] VERBS = { "get", "drop", "open", .. }; private static final String[][] COMPOUND = { { "unlock", "with" }, { "pour", "on" }, { "give", "to" }, ... }; private static final String[] OBJECTS = { "cage", "bird", "nugget", "... }; Then I just have some simple code to iterate through all combinations: private void generateVerbs() { for (String verb : VERBS) { for (String directObject : OBJECTS) addUtterance(verb, verb+" {"+directObject+"|directObject}"); addIntent(verb, "directObject"); } } private void generateCompoundVerbs() { for (String[] compound : COMPOUND) { String verb = compound[0]; String prep = compound[1]; for (String directObject : OBJECTS) { for (String indirectObject : OBJECTS) { addUtterance(verb, verb+" {"+directObject+"|directObject} "+prep+" {"+indirectObject+"|indirectObject}"); } } addIntent(verb, "directObject", "indirectObject"); } } It was a lot easier than coming up with the 4569 utterances by hand! This approach could be made generic by coming up with a data format for the same. Then a pre-processor to convert that to the raw files. Say: get<.synonym><.synonym>drop<.synonym>... ... unlock with Sure, it would be great to see this in the AppKit. But it looks like they have a lot of fish to fry right now. If this need can be met by a pre-processor for now, this is something that can be community lead. If we get a couple of people to achieve consensus on a format, one of us could write a tool to do the pre-processing suitable for patching into a build script.

Of course we all are thinking that way, you have to write a generator. However it's like we go from a terse definition thru a generator and echo parses that back down to what's probably a similar terse definition. So I'm really hoping we get some hyping better exposed. But like you I'll have to write a generator, but for large data sets I don't know if I'll hit a limit.

After experimenting a bit today I can't imagine them not doing a generic wildcard placeholder, and let our apps check for validity. It just makes a lot of sense. Alternately it would make sense to let us define slot types with uploaded databases or provide standards based sources like iso codes etc. I imagine the intelligence it uses now is leveraging some of that now to know how to synthesize things from our samples. It's just odd to me, the utterance sample approach seems like a stopgap trying to make things simple until they can expose a more direct way of specifying syntax. So I'm on the fence if I'm going to write a parser yet. I have to deal with cities and there are many!

I've been assuming the slots [i]are[/i] wildcard slots. In the Eliza demo, they are speaking, pretty much, free text to the Echo. And it is clearly understanding the words and repeating them back. I asked in another thread how they did that: what intents did they use. What they said was they basically had N number of intents with N number of slots each. I.e. intent #1 with 1 slot, intent #2 with 2 slots, etc. I was designing the intents for my grocery list app today with things like: ADD I need more . Sure, I'll come up with a list of apples and oranges and so forth and generate utterances for them for item. But I expect those are just "hints". That if someone says something else, but in the same format, that it will parse and pass me the word in the slot, even if it isn't explicitly defined in the utterance. That's what I did for my simulator. I had a little evaluation thing so that if it matched the actual word in a slot, that it would rate it a high confidence, but anything that matched the pattern was a possible, but at lower confidence. I don't have an actual Echo to test this out against. But it seems consistent with the demos they've shown.