You have several questions so I splitted my answer in 2 parts.
Information detection (departement, names)
[I want to] understand intents such as 'Who is in Hospitality', or 'Who is Joe
Bloggs', but I'm struggling with how to do this.
Do I use entities for departments and people?
Department:
If you have a limited and known list of departments, you can create an Entity
which type will be List
. It will process an exact text match
on the items of this list (see doc here).
If you don't have this list, use an Entity
of type Simple
(see doc here) and label this entity in several (various) examples utterances that you provide. You can improve the detection by also adding a Phrase list
in that case: it will help and is not processing an exact match in the list. And you should improve it over the time.
People:
For the people name detection, it will be a little bit more tricky. You can have a look to Communication.ContactName
pre-built entity. If it's not working, create your own simple entity but I'm not sure that the results will be relevant.
"Small talk" part
Are there Pre-Built Intents for 'Greetings' and other commonly used
intents?
There is no pre-built intents but there is a Lab Project called Personality Chat
that is designed to manage such cases (in English only for the moment): https://labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/en-us/project-personality-chat
It is still in a lab version, so you should not use in production, but it is mostly open-source so you can give it a try and see if it fits your needs.