# Ask: Custom entity

The **Ask: Custom entity** node is helpful when you need a specific type of information that is not covered by one of the other **Ask** variants (**Ask: Phone**, **Ask: Email**, **Ask: Number,** etc). For example, when asking a user for a city in the Netherlands, using **Ask: Choice** or **Ask: Selection** would simply require too many options to be configured in the Flow.

**Ask: Custom entity** will try to capture the answer to a question as well as possible. It uses ChatGPT in the background to complete the task. Since ChatGPT knows how city names are used in a sentence (like "I live in Amsterdam"), and because ChatGPT knows quite a number of cities due to its training, it is able to extract a city name from a sentence.

Here are two examples: one to extract cities and the other to extract car brands.

<figure><img src="https://3356808761-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FEBQHGJABNTj5ISSOTRxM%2Fuploads%2FMVyBVp9PuH5exFhvNs5Z%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=2073a86d-ae61-4324-b753-83e29a01cc69" alt=""><figcaption><p>Example of how to extract the name of a city using Ask: Custom entity</p></figcaption></figure>

For this to work the only thing that needs to be configured in the **Ask: Custom entity** node is the following:

<figure><img src="https://3356808761-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FEBQHGJABNTj5ISSOTRxM%2Fuploads%2FaPDAtodpMkJEn6Ay52Zg%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=c46b6174-d786-496b-8b18-0c78495f4610" alt=""><figcaption><p>Ask: Custom entity for asking cities</p></figcaption></figure>

The next example shows a similar use case, this time eliciting a car brand from the user.

<figure><img src="https://3356808761-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FEBQHGJABNTj5ISSOTRxM%2Fuploads%2FwNfG7gDiVe1YuMY86KbA%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=1b3c26b3-5c82-43f0-832d-31b3555ccd56" alt=""><figcaption><p>Example of how to extract the name of a car brand using Ask: Custom entity</p></figcaption></figure>

For this example, the Ask: Custom entity node is configured as follows:

<figure><img src="https://3356808761-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FEBQHGJABNTj5ISSOTRxM%2Fuploads%2FaPYCRj10M8UDmTg3axCv%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=10410b6f-44a9-40a2-9b5a-66676810ed49" alt=""><figcaption><p>Ask: Custom entity for asking car brands</p></figcaption></figure>

{% hint style="info" %}
Since ChatGPT is used under the hood, the extraction works best for commonly used entities that rely on data that is commonly available in the dataset ChatGPT was trained on. For example, asking for an internal company specific entity like part names and numbers of products that are not publicly available to the outside world will be less likely to be extracted in a good way.
{% endhint %}

### Node properties

| Property            | Description                                                                           | Explanation                                                |
| ------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------- |
| Question            | The original question                                                                 |                                                            |
| Try again (1)       | The repeat question when wrong input is provided                                      | optional                                                   |
| Try again (2)       | The repeat question when wrong input is provided                                      | optional                                                   |
| Assign to           | To assign the result to a variable in the conversation                                |                                                            |
| Remember            | To also store the variable in the user object                                         |                                                            |
| Record audio ☎      | On phone channels there is an option to record the audio of the answer                |                                                            |
| Assign audio URL to | If record audio is toggled, the URL to the audio file will be stored in this variable | Only displayed and mandatory when Record audio is toggled. |
| Expecting           | Describe what entity you are expecting                                                | Like: Cities in the Netherlands, Car brands or Prices.     |
| Examples            | Give some examples of the entities you would like to get captured.                    | In the case of cities: "Amsterdam", "Rotterdam", etc.      |