What is the minimum number of intents recommended to start with NLP?

Starting with three to five intents and a minimum of 20 utterances per intent is considered best practice for developing a natural language processing (NLP) model. This recommendation creates a solid foundation for the NLP system to understand user queries effectively.

Having multiple intents allows the model to recognize a broader range of commands and inquiries, reflecting the various tasks users might want to perform. With each intent, providing a minimum of 20 utterances helps capture the different ways users might express the same intent. This variety enables the model to learn different phrasing, synonyms, slang, and context-specific language, improving its ability to discern the intended meaning behind user inputs.

This approach strikes a balance between complexity and functionality, as it is manageable for initial training while still providing enough data for the model to generalize well to real-world language use. Starting with fewer intents or utterances may lead to a system that can't accurately identify user intents, while too many could complicate the training process without significant gains in performance.