Padatious Pipeline

The Padatious Pipeline Plugin brings examples-based intent recognition to the OpenVoiceOS (OVOS) pipeline. It enables developers to define intents using example sentences, offering a simple and code-free way to create natural language interfaces for voice skills.

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Pipeline Stages

This plugin registers the following pipeline stages:

Pipeline ID	Description	Recommended Use
padatious_high	High-confidence Padatious intent matches	✅ Primary stage for Padatious use
padatious_medium	Medium-confidence Padatious matches	⚠️ Backup if confidence tuning allows
padatious_low	Low-confidence Padatious matches	🚫 Not recommended (often inaccurate)

Each stage is triggered based on the confidence level of the parsed intent, as configured in your system.

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Configuration

Configure Padatious thresholds in your ovos.conf:

"intents": {
  "padatious": {
    "conf_high": 0.85,
    "conf_med": 0.65,
    "conf_low": 0.45
  }
}

These thresholds control which pipeline level receives a given intent result.

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Multilingual Support

Padatious is excellent for multilingual environments because intents are defined in plain text .intent files, not in code. This allows translators and non-developers to contribute new languages easily without touching Python.

To add another language, simply create a new .intent file in the relevant language folder, such as:

locale/pt-pt/weather.intent
locale/fr-fr/weather.intent

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Defining Intents

Intent examples are written line-by-line in .intent files:

what is the weather
tell me the weather
what's the weather like

In your skill:

from ovos_workshop.decorators import intent_handler

@intent_handler("weather.intent")
def handle_weather(self, message):
    # Your code here
    pass

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Limitations

Padatious is reliable in terms of not misclassifying — it rarely picks the wrong intent. However, it has key limitations:

• Weak paraphrase handling: If the user speaks a sentence that doesn’t closely match an example, Padatious will often fail to match anything at all.

• Rigid phrasing required: You may end up in a “train the user to speak correctly” scenario, instead of training the system to understand variations.

• Maintenance burden for sentence diversity: Adding more phrasing requires adding more sentence examples per intent, increasing effort and clutter.

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When to Use

Padatious is a good choice in OVOS when:

• You want easy localization/multilingual support.
• You’re creating simple, personal, or demo skills.
• You can control or guide user phrasing, such as in kiosk or assistant environments.

Avoid Padatious for complex conversational use cases, skills with overlapping intents, or scenarios requiring broad paraphrasing support.