RASA and Conversational Flow with Buttons

Hello RASA Community,

I’m currently working on the design of our chatbot and a few questions regarding the handling of buttons came up, which I would like to discuss here. Maybe the thread will help one or the other. Namely, my consideration is to control most of the conversation/responses of the users via buttons, as this has the advantage that the intent is reliably recognized and the user talks about things the chatbot has been trained to do. Here are my questions:

  1. Can I implement it so that the payload of each button has the /intent_value as its payload? Accordingly, I assume that the NLU would then skip the evaluation and simply predict the intent, is that correct?
  2. If the answer format for a question is a button, is training still needed for the chatbot to know which intent is meant? Or can I also use this to reduce the training and thus the size of the model?
  3. If only buttons are allowed in the whole conversation “menu bot”, would RASA be a good choice at all or should I use a framework that doesn’t use training at all to keep it slim?
  4. Is it somehow possible to disable the free response format, i.e. the text field where responses are entered, so that the user is “forced” to respond with a button?

I look really forward to hear your answers and appreciate every input! Thank you!