Setting a slot before conversation begins

Rasa Open Source
1

Hiya everyone,

Is there a way to set certain slots before a conversation between bot and user begins? I’d like to retrieve some information from the website the bot will be running on, and using that information to completely change how the dialog will flow.

2

Hi Remy, we are doing this in our project by using the welcome intent :

The first message send to the bot comes from the chat (and not the user) and it sends :

/welcome{\"entity\":\"WhatEverYouWant\"}

This intention will return a welcome message, but if you don’t want to send a message in return, you can just put a story looking like this :

## story_bienvenue
* welcome
  - action_listen

Note that I set the entity slot as unfeaturized to avoid impacting my stories.

entity:
    type: unfeaturized

Hope it helps

3

Well, if you have a good idea of what your first intent from the user is likely to be, you could just follow it with a custom action that would get the information that you need and set the slot accordingly.

4

Thanks for the reply guys! I’m going to try these today. I’ll report back later.