Allow conversation within a custom action

Rasa Open Source
1

Hello, I’m wondering if there is a way to either facilitate back and forth with a 3rd party application that doesn’t require the conversation turns to go through the NLU/dialog management or essentially having Rasa be passive until control is passed back to it.

I tried this in a custom action, but can’t figure out a way to allow the conversation to go for more than one turn to collect user input and return information from the 3rd party app.

Thank you!

2

hi @sver ! welcome to the forum. I think you can probably treat this the same way as a human handoff. There’s an example of that in the helpdesk assistant

Alternatively you can manually return ConversationPaused and ConversationResumed events from your custom action.

3

Fantastic, thank you for the direction, I was able to get it working - my next question is if there is a way to have rasa continue to ‘record’ the conversation while it’s been redirected to the live agent.

Motive of the question is 2 fold:

  1. It will be helpful to have the entire dialog in one store for subsequent analytics
  2. Eventually it would be interesting to have the rasa agent in the background serving up responses to the live agent during the chat to help make the conversation more efficient.
4

thanks @sver ! we don’t have a native way of doing that right now but it does make total sense. I guess one way would be to create a custom event class or two, similar to UserUttered and BotUttered but that Rasa ignores. Would love to know what you come up with! Would be a cool thing to support natively.