Voyage -1-Understanding what is Rasa and Make the first Chatbot

Chatbot for Travel Industry we will be building here

So it was July 6 — 2020
It was my first day at my office and straight after the intro and my job tasks when I was assigned my first project ( which was in RASA ) my team was supposed to Build a chat-bot using RASA.
And we were new to this technology and the domains of chat-bots but somehow after a struggle of 3 months, we met our deadlines and delivered our first project.
But the thing that I noticed in 3 months. Lack of proper blogs and even if there are few they don’t deal with whole production level chat-bots.

So I am taking this initiative
For the next 7 blogs (at least 7 I have planned count can only increase ) I will try to teach you the following things:-

1. Basic terminologies of RASA and Getting started with RASA ( Virtual env setup and BASIC Bot )
2. What is the File structure of RASA and how we deal with Intents and Entities and we can make ours?
3. How to handle FAQ’ and Chatbots.
   a. How to deal with Multiple domain files and Nlu files
4. CUSTOM ACTIONS
   a. BASIC USE OF CUSTOM ACTIONS.
   b. USE OF SENTENCE TRANSFORMERS FOR CUSTOM ACTIONS
5. What is RASA X and how we can use it?
6. Deploy it on your website
7. Dockerise your chatbot ( so that everyone can use it without installing RASA)

DISCLAIMER — No Knowledge of RASA is required :smile:

We will make Travel Bot using RASA in this series of Blog

So let’s Jump Directly Into it.

Rasa is an open-source machine learning framework for building AI assistants and chatbots. Mostly you don’t need any programming language experience to work in Rasa

For

Ubuntu 16+, Mac OS, and Windows 10 (Visual C++ Build tool)

Note: In case you are working on windows, make sure you have installed the Visual c++ build tool. This is required for some python packages. Use miniconda to avoid the issue with other installed Python packages in your system or conflicting Python Version.

And then install Miniconda

Miniconda - Conda documentation

After installing miniconda, Follow the below commands to create a virtual environment in conda. This will allow you to run Rasa without errors.

How to Make a virtual environment for Rasa

For this tutorial, I am using Ubuntu 18.04

conda update conda
conda create -n travel-bot python=3.6 anaconda
conda activate travel-bot

after making the virtual environment

How to install Rasa in Virtual Environment

pip3 install -U pip
pip3 install rasa

in case you get an error regarding ruamel. yaml try this

pip3 install rasa --ignore-installed ruamel.yaml

Yippee You have done the First Bit
and I feel the toughest part.

Now let’s make

Basic Bot

just type:-

rasa init

It will ask you whether you want to Train your model press yes.

so after spending nearly 2 minutes You will see this

Would you believe it?
You have made the Basic Bot. Rasa provides you every time with this very simple architecture Now incoming tutorials, we will Modify this environment to Make our TRAVEL-BOT.

Try talking to your Bot In the next tutorial I will explain
Files you have got using Rasa Init
and what is their meaning

To stop talking to your bot type

/stop

Hope you liked it
:+1:

If yes alike will awesome and follow will be Tremendous
:fire: