# Entity Types

Different entities will produce different intent recognition results. You can find here a full reference of all currently supported entity types.

## Default Entities

This is the default entity type for any newly created entity both manually and contextually. Default entities can be single or multiple words long. 

All default entities that are recognized inside a user expression are automatically translated to a corresponding [Xenioo variable](https://docs10.xenioo.com/actions-and-operations/variables-and-tags) for your chatbot. A "food" entity, if recognized, will become a variable "food" with a value equal to the word (or words) specified by the user inside the expression.

## Numbers

Numbers are built-in entities that do not need and entity definition and are recognized and translated automatically by Xenioo into a numerical value.

Whenever the user uses a number inside an expression, Xenioo will automatically create a variable for your chatbot called "number\<COUNT>" where \<COUNT> will be a number starting from one indicating the index of the number. For example, an expression like this:

```
I am 40 years old
```

Will generate a variable called **number1** with **40** as value. An expression like this :

```
I'll be twenty years old in one month
```

Will generate a variable called **number1** with **20** as value and one called **number2** with **1** as value.\
\
Numbers are recognized and transformed only if expressed in the language of the intent being triggered.

## Wildcards

Wildcards act formally like Default entities with one important exception: *values do not need to be specified*. This means that once you identify a specific part of a sentence as wildcard anything that the user says inside the expression boundary will be translated to an entity value. So, for example:

```
My name is John and I'm 20 years old
```

In the expression, we mark John as an entity user\_name like this:

```
My name is {user_name} and I'm 20 years old
```

Using a default entity type, we would need to specify all possible first names and sometimes this is impossible. Instead, we proceed to update the entity by manually making it a wildcard. From now on anything specified by the user inside that expression (or similar) is passed to user\_name. For example, taking the following expression:

```
My name is Mark Albert the third and I'm 20 years old
```

Xenioo will recognize the sentence and extract as a wildcard a user\_name entity value "Mark Albert the third". Of course expression variations are acceptable as well as multiple expression containing the same wildcard.