iancmason / rasa_chatbots

Tutorials for a chatbot workshop

Learn How to build a chatbot

I have been building chatbots for past 3 years using existing platforms like Google's Dialogflow, Wit.ai, Recast.ai. Over the years I have fallen in love with open source frameworks and Rasa is one of the best to build chatbots. In this tutorial we will build 3 simple chatbots thereby understanding the basics and what differentiates chatbots webapps

Bots

1. Echo bot - A bot that repeats whatever you say
2. Google Search Bot - A bot that searches Google for you
3. wordbot - A bot that gives you meaning and opposites

Each bot has it's own folder with Tutorial.md file.

How do we build it?

Any chatbot building consist of 3 parts

1. Training your bot
2. Writing your actions
3. Giving a chat interface

Prerequistes

This repo assumes you know python, if you don't learn basics of python and ML and get back here.

1. python 3.7
2. pip
3. virtualenv

Setup

I use virtualenv to create a virtualenv and create

pip install -r requirements.txt

Creating bot from scratch

mkdir <botname>
cd <botname>
rasa init

Using Existing bot

1. Echo bot

For a bot that repeats whatever a user says we don't need any NLP. But this will help us few concepts.

But before moving on let's do this without any NLP.

cd echo_bot/

python bot_without_nlp.py

2. Search bot

Again, a search bot does not need much of NLP. But this example is just to explain how chatbots make an API call to fetch you data.

cd search_bot/

python bot_without_nlp.py

3. Word bot

1. Train the bot

cd wordbot
rasa train

2. Run the command line UI

rasa shell

3. Run the actions server

rasa run actions