Rasa: Build Your Own AI Chatbot with Joey Faulkner

Summary With the proliferation of messaging applications, there has been a growing demand for bots that can understand our wishes and perform our bidding. The rise of artificial intelligence has brought the capacity for understanding human language. Combining these two trends gives us chatbots that can be used as a new interface to the software and services that we depend on. This week Joey Faulkner shares his work with Rasa Technologies and their open sourced libraries for understanding natural language and how to conduct a conversation. We talked about how the Rasa Core and Rasa NLU libraries work and how you can use them to replace your dependence on API services and own your data. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable. When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at podastinit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. And now you can deliver your work to your users even faster with the newly upgraded 200 GBit network in all of their datacenters. If you’re tired of cobbling together your deployment pipeline then it’s time to try out GoCD, the open source continuous delivery platform built by the people at ThoughtWorks who wrote the book about it. With GoCD you get complete visibility into the life-cycle of your software from one location. To download it now go to podcatinit.com/gocd. Professional support and enterprise plugins are available for added piece of mind. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email hosts@podcastinit.com) To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Joey Faulkner about Rasa Core and Rasa NLU for adding conversational AI to your projects. Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you start by explaining the goals of Rasa as a company and highlighting the projects that you have open sourced? What are the differences between the Rasa Core and Rasa NLU libraries and how do they relate to each other? How does the interaction model change when going from state machine driven bots to those which use Rasa Core and what capabilities does it unlock? How is Rasa NLU implemented and how has the design evolved? What are the motivations for someone to use Rasa core or NLU as a library instead of available API services such as wit.ai, LUIS, or Dialogflow? What are some of the biggest challenges in gathering and curating useful training data? What is involved in supporting multiple languages for an application using Rasa? What are the biggest challenges that you face, past, present, and future, building and growing the tools and platform for Rasa? What would be involved for projects such as OpsDroid, Kalliope, or Mycroft to take advantage of Rasa and what benefit would that provide? On the comparison page for the hosted Rasa platform it mentions a feature of collaborative model training, can you describe how that works and why someone might want to take advantage of it? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of the Rasa tools that you have seen? What do you have planned for the future of Rasa? Keep In Touch Gitter Twitter @joeymfaulkner @Rasa_HQ Email GitHub Picks Tobias Information Architecture Joey Dog Spotting Rasa NLU Trainer Links Rasa Technologies Rasa NLU Rasa Core SpaCy Podcast.__init__ Interview with SpaCy Creator yt-project Podcast.__init__ Interview with yt-project Chatbot Word2Vec State Machine Podcast.__init__ Episode About Automat with Glyph Recursive Neural Network MITIE Support Vector Machine Scikit Learn wit.ai LUIS Dialogflow Keras Reinforcement Learning The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA