Trigger action without intent

Hello everyone! I’m new in Rasa. I want to perform smart search with rasa. I have third party service, that provides search football players by their name. Its hard for ai to identify surnames, because they are very different. I’m want see this as result:

user: I want find a footballer (intent: football)
bot: OK, type his surname  (action: ask_football_name)
(action:action_listen)
user: Lewandowski (here should be not any intent triggered)
bot: He is Polish (action: custom_search, realized with third party service)

I want to trigger custom_search action in ask_football_name but after user’s input for purpose to use it as search body. How can I perform this? I’ve tried to use slots and forms, but it works bad with something strange for ai as surname. Can someone help me with this?

Hi! Welcome to rasa community :smiley:

I think you can use FollowupAction and check surname slot using some custom action

@itsjhonny thank you. It’s was very useful, but problem still with me. I can’t use slot, because its hard for ai to understand what surname is. FollowupAction might be useful when I use ‘action_listen’ get text from user and use it in my custom action. In my case rasa skip ‘action_listen’ and goes to next action. How can I force rasa to wait until user write next messsage?

I’ve tried to force rasa do something like that

action: form
action: action_listen
action: set_surname_slot
active_loop: null
    - slot_was_set:
      required_slot: null

But it didn’t work for me as I expected. Do somebody have any suggestions?