RASA: A Framework for Creating Virtual Agents or Chatbots

In a universe being taken over by artificial intelligence and chatbots, a star is born, already a few years old and much loved by the Open Source community, RASA.

I started working with RASA because even before generative models existed, I was interested in the power of making a machine “understand” what we were asking. The NLP (Natural Language Processing) models that encompass NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and NLG (Natural Language Generation) are processes that decompile the information that the user enters and with “some calculations” predict what they want. To me, this was fantastic and so I ventured into the world of chatbots initially with Microsoft’s Virtual Agents but soon realized that it wasn’t quite what I wanted and with a little research I came to RASA.

RASA is a framework for creating virtual agents or chatbots, which has a particularity, everything that can be developed in Python can be added as a function of it, and yes, this is what allows you to level up in chatbots, is to say do this and it does it!

Let’s install our framework to play with chatbots!

Installing Python

The installation differs between systems that you want to use. I will focus only on Windows 10 or higher and Ubuntu 22.04.

Windows

In Windows environments, simply access the Microsoft Store, search for “python”, and then install the Python 3.10 version.

Ubuntu 22.04

Python 3.10 is already native in Ubuntu 22.04 so you don’t need to do anything, unless you want to confirm the version and you can do it with the command:

python3 --version

Installing RASA

To install RASA, you can use the following command:

pip install rasa

Creating a New Project

To create a new project, use the following command:

rasa init <project-name>

Starting the RASA Server

To start the RASA server, use the following command:

rasa run

Testing the Bot

You can test the bot by sending messages to it in the Rasa shell. To open the Rasa shell, use the following command:

rasa shell

Conclusion

RASA is a powerful framework for creating virtual agents or chatbots. It is easy to use and has a large community of users and developers use it you won’t regret.