Recast.AI, Rasa NLU, Windows support and more in v0.11

It’s been a while since the last release due the Christmas being in the way, however I’m excited to announce some awesome new features in opsdroid v0.11.0.

We also had our 1000th build on Travis CI!

Thinking and typing delays

Sometimes when chatting with a bot it can respond to you so quickly the whole conversation feels unnatural. This new feature allows you to slow your bot down by specifying a delay for thinking and typing time.

If you have configured thinking time the bot will simply wait a short while before responding and if you have configured typing time you will see a “bot is typing…” message in your chat client if it supports it.

Windows Support

There is now official support for Windows in opsdroid. Much of the module loader and tests have been updated to work with Windows style directory structures and all tests will now be run on AppVeyor to ensure support doesn’t get broken accidentally.

Recast.AI

Recast.AI joins the list of third-party natural language understanding (NLU) services which allow you to create intelligent bots.

Rasa NLU

Rasa NLU also joins the list of NLU services, however there is one exciting difference, Rasa NLU is completely offline!

Simply run Rasa NLU on the same machine that you are running opsdroid and configure opsdroid to connect to it. This is great for privacy conscious folks who would rather not send their entire chat history through a third party API controlled by some of the worlds biggest companies.

Support for Rasa NLU also introduces a self training feature in opsdroid. Skills can now include a list of structured intent data which will automatically be trained into a model at runtime. Currently only Rasa NLU supports this but we are looking to add this to other services which support training via an API.

Full release notes

Enhancements

Add Rasa NLU parser/matcher (#336)
Add Recast.AI parser (#343)
Add windows support (#382)
Add typing/thinking delay and user is typing event (#376)

Bug fixes

Try pip3 if pip is not found (#387)
Remove extra memory warnings and expand on startup warning (#390)
Set parsers to [] if None (#389)
Fix for parsers being None (#379)
Add memory warning (#386)
Better log message for git clone (#363)
Remove print from critical function (#359)
Reduced the redundancy on requirements.txt, and highlighted the development installation mode with pip. (#334)

Breaking changes

None

Documentation updates

Improve Beginner Friendliness (#338)
Add skill update script (#370)
Document the release process (#329)

Release v0.11.1

Bug Fixes

Fix mkdocs.yml and add tests for future use (#399)

Release v0.11.2

Bug Fixes

Added -it param to docker run installation with Docker (#417)
Update setup.py to have correct license (#415)
Add importlib.util import to loader.py file (#411)
Update git modules on startup (#409)