Book Image

Conversational AI with Rasa

By : Xiaoquan Kong, Guan Wang
Book Image

Conversational AI with Rasa

By: Xiaoquan Kong, Guan Wang

Overview of this book

The Rasa framework enables developers to create industrial-strength chatbots using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technologies quickly, all in open source. Conversational AI with Rasa starts by showing you how the two main components at the heart of Rasa work – Rasa NLU (natural language understanding) and Rasa Core. You'll then learn how to build, configure, train, and serve different types of chatbots from scratch by using the Rasa ecosystem. As you advance, you'll use form-based dialogue management, work with the response selector for chitchat and FAQ-like dialogs, make use of knowledge base actions to answer questions for dynamic queries, and much more. Furthermore, you'll understand how to customize the Rasa framework, use conversation-driven development patterns and tools to develop chatbots, explore what your bot can do, and easily fix any mistakes it makes by using interactive learning. Finally, you'll get to grips with deploying the Rasa system to a production environment with high performance and high scalability and cover best practices for building an efficient and robust chat system. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own chatbots using Rasa, addressing the common pain points encountered in the chatbot life cycle.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Rasa Framework
5
Section 2: Rasa in Action
11
Section 3: Best Practices

Understanding the community ecosystem of Rasa

Rasa only offers core infrastructure and does not offer additional tools to help developers build bots. Rasa focuses on solutions for NLU and dialogue management, however, to create a complete chatbot, we also need to work on data collection, data generation, data labeling, and so on. We can do this by writing scripts, but this is not friendly to developers.

There are some open source projects in the developer community that can help and may act as additional tools to work together with Rasa to build chatbots. We introduce some of those tools in the following subsections.

Data generation tool – Chatito

Chatito is a data generation tool that helps developers to generate data with the simple format of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL). A DSL is a computer language specially designed for a particular application domain. Using a DSL has many advantages, such as being much more expressive in their domain than general-purpose programming...