This is a companion to the NLU concept guide, which discusses the NLU subsystem holistically. Here we’ll talk about usage issues specific to the React Native client library.

Configuration

As mentioned in the Getting Started guide, initializing the Spokestack NLU is done using the same interface as the other Spokestack components:

Spokestack.initialize(
  process.env.SPOKESTACK_CLIENT_ID,
  process.env.SPOKESTACK_CLIENT_SECRET,
  {
    nlu: {
      model: require('./nlu.tflite'),
      metadata: require('./metadata.json'),
      vocab: require('./vocab.txt')
    }
  }
)

Including model files in your app bundle requires a small change to your React Native bundler config. See this guide for more info.

You can also pass URLs, in which case the files will be downloaded and cached automatically on first initialize.

Spokestack.initialize(
  process.env.SPOKESTACK_CLIENT_ID,
  process.env.SPOKESTACK_CLIENT_SECRET,
  {
    nlu: {
      model: 'https://s.spokestack.io/u/7fYxV/nlu.tflite',
      metadata: 'https://s.spokestack.io/u/7fYxV/metadata.json',
      vocab: 'https://s.spokestack.io/u/7fYxV/vocab.txt'
    }
  }
)

Usage

When it comes time to classify an utterance, Spokestack’s NLU does all the heavy lifting on a background thread and returns the classification result via an event body.

Call classify with the text you want to classify.

const result = await Spokestack.classify('How do I make a castle?').catch(
  handleError
)

The result will be an object with the following structure:

{
  "intent": "RecipeIntent",
  "confidence": "0.9999006",
  "slots": [{
    "value":"castle",
    "type":"entity"
  }]
}

From there, your app takes over and acts on the intent and slots.

For more information on NLU, see the NLU concept guide.