# Building Custom Bot, How to Make it Speak First

**URL:** <https://forum.rasa.com/t/building-custom-bot-how-to-make-it-speak-first/22607>\
**Category:** Rasa Open Source\
**Created:** [December 18, 2019, 6:54pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/building-custom-bot-how-to-make-it-speak-first/22607 "2019-12-18T18:54:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Eli](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@Eli](https://forum.rasa.com/u/Eli)\
**Post date:** [December 18, 2019, 6:54pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/building-custom-bot-how-to-make-it-speak-first/22607/1 "2019-12-18T18:54:08Z")

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Hello Rasa Community, I am currently building a custom bot that helps with HR around the office, it will go in an internal webpage, so everything is pretty much coded from scratch, save for the CSS framework.

So far for a greeting, I have this successful story:

## greeting

- greet

- utter\_greet
- utter\_provide\_help

However, I cannot get the bot to speak first using:

## greeting

- utter\_greet
- utter\_provide\_help

How do I get it speak first?

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**Author:** ![btotharye](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.rasa.com/btotharye/32/5321_2.png) [@btotharye](https://forum.rasa.com/u/btotharye)\
**Post date:** [December 20, 2019, 2:43pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/building-custom-bot-how-to-make-it-speak-first/22607/2 "2019-12-20T14:43:15Z")

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Hello @Eli,

I would recommend starting with our tutorial that goes over the initial bot and all the pieces, including the stories to get this working correctly. I would need to see more data around your bot and screenshots of the logs to know what exactly is happening for your bot.

I would check out [Getting Started with Rasa](https://rasa.com/docs/getting-started/) and do the `rasa init` command to create the initial bot project that has a basic hello example to look at and build upon.