Palavreado

In a nutshell

Palavreado is an intent parser that decides what a user wants by looking for specific keywords in what they said. If the right words are present, the intent fires. It is a dead-simple, drop-in replacement for Adapt. See the Glossary for terms like intent and entity.

Not in the default pipeline. Add its stage IDs to intents.pipeline explicitly to use it.

A keyword-based intent parser. The drop-in replacement for Adapt.

palavreado matches utterances against named intents built from required and optional keyword slots. Each slot holds a list of vocabulary words. If the required words are present in the utterance, the intent fires. An autoregex variant enables keyword extraction, pulling out a value like an item name, using simplematch-style templates.

Install

pip install palavreado            # the library
pip install --pre "palavreado[ovos]>=1.0.0a1"    # + the OVOS pipeline plugin

Usage

Intents are built with the fluent IntentCreator builder, then registered on the container:

from palavreado import IntentContainer, IntentCreator
container = IntentContainer()
intent = (
    IntentCreator("greet")
    .require("hello", ["hello", "hi"])
    .optionally("name", ["john", "mary"])
)
container.add_intent(intent)
result = container.calc_intent("hello there")
print(result["name"])                # greet
print(result["conf"])                # confidence score
print(result["keywords"])            # {'hello': ['hello']} - matched keyword slots
print(result["utterance"])           # 'hello there' - the original utterance
print(result["utterance_remainder"]) # 'there' - words not consumed by any slot

An intent only fires when every required slot has at least one keyword match in the utterance. Optional slots add to the result when present, but they are not required to fire.

In the OVOS pipeline

Installed as a pipeline plugin (palavreado[ovos]), Palavreado responds to the same register_vocab / register_intent bus events as Adapt. Swapping it in requires zero skill changes. Your .voc files keep working. See Pipelines Overview for how matchers are ordered and configured.

Like the other confidence-tier pipeline plugins, it fires at three thresholds:

Method	Fires when	Default threshold
match_high	conf >= conf_high	0.65
match_medium	conf >= conf_med	0.45
match_low	conf >= conf_low	0.25

Set conf_high, conf_med, conf_low, and max_words under mycroft.conf's "intents.palavreado" section to tune these.

Adapt compatibility gap: at_least_one groups

Palavreado only partially supports Adapt's at_least_one requirement groups: it treats them as optional rather than enforcing that at least one member matches. A skill that relies on strict at_least_one enforcement may match differently under Palavreado than under Adapt — check this before swapping it in for a skill that uses at_least_one.

When to choose Palavreado

Use it as a lighter, simpler stand-in for Adapt when you want keyword matching without Adapt's full rule engine. For example-based (whole-sentence) matching, use Padatious or Nebulento instead.

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Read next: Padatious Pipeline Related: Nebulento · Padacioso · Adapt Pipeline