Build Your First RASA Chatbot

What is chatbot?

Chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that can understand as well as repond to human conversation. Chatbot can be deployed in many platform such as websites, mobile apps, and messaging channels. Chatbot works in a way that it is able to immitate human conversations and make it seems like they are human and not just a computer program. Chatbot can be built for any kind of purposes including business purposes.

Why should business consider building chatbot?

Nowadays enterprises compete in building the best virtual assistant (chatbot) that helps user understand about how a company works. Besides acting as the customer assistance, chatbot can also improve customer sales, gives insights about the customers’ interest and even helps enterprise saving more money.

How can chatbot does that?

1. Chatbot is a 24-hour virtual assistant that is programmed to do desired tasks, such as giving information about product using texts, images, and even videos. This helps user understand more about the product, the price of product, etc.
2. With a good workflow, chatbot can even generate more sales. Chatbot can contribute in making a user interested into buying a product if it can maintain the flow of the conversation right.
3. From the workflow of the chats, chatbot can even gain insights from the user feedback or replies. This help companies understand better what user wants and what they need.
4. Building chatbot is cheaper than hiring an employee to do the tasks or making a new program to do the tasks.

Chatbot actually learns from the real conversation between the user and its agent.
There are a lot of platform that can be used to build chatbots. One platform that is being used a lot for building conversational chatbot is RASA. RASA is an open source conversational AI framework for building contextual assistants.

Rasa Open Source includes:

• NLU: determines what the user wants and captures key contextual information
• Core: selects the next best response or action based on conversation history
• Channels and integrations: connect assistant to users and backend systems

Source: https://rasa.com/docs/getting-started/

Here is some example of interactions from RASA bot that learns interactively that is built using RASA framework:

This RASA bot is built by using the RASA framework and visualized using RASA x.

For more understanding about basics of RASA, you can watch this youtube video: