Creating a single story for multiple entities based on the entity value

Rasa Open Source
1

Hello Folks

I’m quite new to RASA and I am trying to build a chatbot on a sales domain. One functionality of the chatbot is supposed to accept a timeframe value (weekly/monthly/quarterly) and return the corresponding revenue figures

Currently, I am doing it by creating separate actions and stories for each of the timeframe values. However, there are a lot of combinations of stories, and somewhere I feel that managing these many stories would be difficult

Currently, I do not have any entities in my code. While I’m sure that I can make a timeframe as an entity and assign multiple values to it. But what I’m not sure is how do I cater to all the entities in one story itself?

Any help in the form of resources to follow or code snipped would be much appreciated

2

If your bot is in English, you can use duckling to extract dates or timeframes. There’s a general post on entity extraction here.

Also, the financial-demo bot is an example extracting time using duckling. Duckling also supports duration in addition to time. You can then pass this to a custom action to do the query so you don’t need a lot of stories.

3

Thank You @stephens for the response. The entity creation and extraction post were quite helpful!

However, one thing I am still not clear about is can we write a single story to cater to all the values of an entity?

In my case, I want to write a single story for all the entity values (weekly/monthly/quarterly). Would something like this work?

story: todays sales greet goodbye
  steps:
  - intent: begin_main_menu
  - action: utter_main_menu
  - intent: order_menu
  - action: utter_order_menu
  - intent: sales_for_a_particular_timeframe
  - action: utter_timeframe_menu
  - intent: today's_order
    entities:
    - entity_name: cs_timeframe
  - action: time_based_sales_figures
  - action: utter_timeframe_menu
  - intent: goodbye
  - action: utter_goodbye

Here, the action time_based_sales_figures is coded as follows:

class ActionTimeframeSalesFigures(Action):

    def name(self):
        return "time_based_sales_figures"

    def run(self, dispatcher, tracker, domain):
        
        timeframe = next(tracker.get_latest_entity_values("cs_timeframe", None))

        if timeframe == "today's":
            dispatcher.utter_message("Todays Sales figures are 100$")

            return []

        elif timeframe == "weekly":
            dispatcher.utter_message("Current week's sales figures are 100$")

            return []


        elif timeframe == "monthly":
            dispatcher.utter_message("Current month's sales figures are 100$")

            return []

        elif timeframe == "quarterly":
            dispatcher.utter_message("Current quarter's sales figures are 100$")

            return []

        else:
            dispatcher.utter_message("Please enter the correct timeframe")

            return []
4

Yes, you should be able to do this. The financial demo does something like this and there’s some useful code here.