Using slots when running a rasa server

I am working on a django appication. The application has a form with which a user can chat with a bot. This is just a test application for learning and the bot cannot do much.

For the chatbot, I trained a rasa model with a few intents and entities. Once the model was trained, I ran the model as a server with the following command

rasa run -m models --enable-api --log-file out.log

When the user types a message in the form and submits the form, a request is sent to the rasa server and the intent and entities of the message is received as a response.

Now my question is, is there any way for me to use slots to store some of the entities, so as not ask the user for info already provided. And if this is not possible, how do I use rasa core features like stories and slots with django? When I tried researching on this, I could only find on how to use the bot with slack.

Most likely you would want to look at our custom channel documentation, Custom Connectors so you can create your own connector, a webhook if you will that allows you to send communication into Rasa, have it process it, and then send it back out.

Depending on your use case there are already some chat widgets that work with basic HTML and stuff as well but I guess it depends on what you are wanting to do and if you want to just embed that in your django html and use it. One for example is GitHub - botfront/rasa-webchat: A chat widget for Rasa and Botfront

As for the slots and such you are right, you can look more into them here Slots

I used rasa webchat as you suggested. It works fine now. Just another doubt. Can the design of the chat UI be manipulated with css? That would give me more control over the design of the layout

Yea pretty sure it can, I think they documented it on their Readme for that site. For example on the one I’m building out for my snake business you can see the CSS here, nerdysite/global.css at master · the-nerdy-python/nerdysite · GitHub this basically makes mine fit my orange theme. The part for the website I’m using here is a Gatsby SSR piece to make it work where I reference the chat widget at nerdysite/gatsby-ssr.js at master · the-nerdy-python/nerdysite · GitHub

Hopefully that steers you in the right direction on the CSS stuff. And the readme has some of it as well, GitHub - botfront/rasa-webchat: A chat widget for Rasa and Botfront