Is listing potential values for slots necessary?

Rasa Open Source
1

I see in the documentation that any slot value not explicitly declared within the domain will be mapped to __ other__. If my slot does not impact the conversation, is it necessary to list all of the potential values? For example, I have a “language” slot which is currently only set to either English or Spanish. Will there be unexpected behavior if I do not list

values:

- English 
- Spanish

within my domain?

2

If my slot does not impact the conversation, is it necessary to list all of the potential values?

Nope! If your slot does not impact the conversation (users might say spanish or english, but it doesn’t change the story), you can make the slot of type any instead of categorical. Then you won’t have to list values. Hope that helps!

3

you can make the slot of type any instead of categorical . Then you won’t have to list values

Does this mean if it remains ‘categorical’ we must list all potential values?

4

That’s correct – by listing it as categorical, you’re telling the dialogue manager that the value matters and should be taken into account. If you don’t tell it what the possible values could be, you can’t write stories based on those values to train it on.

5

If you don’t tell it what the possible values could be, you can’t write stories based on those values

Oh, I thought I could just check slot values with slot_was_set! Thanks for letting me know

I also interpreted the “influence conversation” portion as “should the bot try and understand this slot within context and use it in selecting a response”, meaning it still would if I explicitly used it in story training but it would not attempt to on its own.