# Glossary

hotword: the phrase you speak to wake Alice, to make her listen to you.
wakeword: the phrase you speak to wake Alice, to make her listen to you. Same as hotword but in Alice's world, the wakeword is linked to a specific user she knows and can identify.
skill: an aptitude for Alice to do something with what you asked her, the utterance she captured/heard. Alice comes with 5 basic skills but more can be installed.
utterance: a phrase spoken by the user, after saying the hotword or a wakeword.
intent: after catching an utterance Alice's NLU turns it into an intent which represents the action the user asked her to do.
slot: a variable in an intent. An intent can have as many slots as needed.
ASR: Automatic Speech Recognition is a component used to capture human speech and turn it into text.
NLU: Natural Language Understanding is a component used to extract intents and slots for the text detected by the ASR.
TTS: Text To Speech is a component used to turn text into an audio file, a voice.
event: An event is something that happened and Alice broadcasts to all of her managers and skills. An event name always starts with "on". examples of events would be "onUserDetected", "onWakeup" or "onRaining".
main-unit: the main unit runs the heavy stuff, it's the machine on which Alice is installed.
satellite: satellites need less resources than the :main-unit:, making them less expensive, they provide at least a microphone and speaker in your other locations to interact with Alice.
location: is a place in space, can be a room in your house, but your house can also be a location, or your garden.
manager: they are the core engines for Alice and all have specific tasks, from loading and managing skills to store telemetry data.
session: could be a synonym of 'dialog'. A session starts by a hotword or a wakeword and Alice starting to listen. The session ends by itself at the end of the dialog exchange, after as many utterances capture and intents treatment as needed, or by timing out.
interface: Alice's interface is a web server she is running internally, on device, that allows you to access many function on a graphical environment. The interface can be deactivated. By defaults, the interface runs on 'http://ALICE_IP:5000'.