Wanted: new ideas for the Rasa demo bot

Hey Rasa Community,

Most of you might have noticed the new demo bot that you can find in our docs and plenty of you have tried it out already. Initially, the demo was planned for the website, that’s why it’s first two skills were booking a sales call and signing up for the newsletter. But after testing it in the docs we noticed that this is a better place for our demo bot to live.

Since it still has to improve a lot, we are looking for new skills that we can teach it. We’re already planning on adding a “how to get started with Rasa” skill, more chitchat and FAQ type interactions (e.g. “How much does Rasa cost?“). We’d like to hear what kind of more complex skills you, the community, would find useful/interesting. What do you think would help Rasa users (from newbies to more advanced users) when visiting the docs?

Beyond the ideas for additional skills, your feedback is always very much appreciated. Feel free to try the bot (again), create issues and tell us how it should improve.

Thank you so much,

Akela, Linda and Alan

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@community We would really appreciate your ideas for this one! :slight_smile:

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Free-text input and address-lookup :grin:

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Interactive tutorial maybe? Step by step conversational guide to build a rasa chatbot with images, videos etc?

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I’ve yet to have a chance to test the demo, but I think it’s a superb idea (letting people clearly see the benefits / capabilities of Rasa will help convince them it’s worth learning more about I hope!)

A key scenario I’d like to see covered is helping direct users unsure of where they should go for the right place to seek further help - this is kind of covered by FAQs, but it’s a really common scenario: people who could help themselves but for whatever reason don’t know where to go for their answer. I guess boiling it down into a requirement would be: for a broad range of similar question types send one response and for another send to a second response. In an ideal bot, this would actually lead straight into relevant follow up, but the first stage is a good starting point (ie where it’s just identified a user as needing category X help or category Y help)

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I had not used demo chat before… I used it now… I think we can do some of the following:

  1. New people who stumble across Rasa would like to know if it costs anything. We can add that skill
  2. I think we can introduce some buttons in the dialog flow to make chat more seamless
  3. When they ask what Rasa can do, I think it is better to give high level sub divisions about Rasa, like NLU part, Core Dialog part and may be Rasa SDK and interactive learning part. May be as button, by clicking it should take to related documentation page
  4. Another skill could be about migration from LUIS/ Dialog flow.
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Thanks for this suggestion Neil! So broadly speaking you’d say like e.g. have an NLU/Core intent and respond differently for each? And as a follow up more specific questions about each?

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Yes, that’s it.

As an example (although for the demo you’d want something more targeted to Rasa), there could be intents in Rasa NLU for each broad category:

  1. Specific FAQs with known answers go to the relevant answer for that FAQ
  2. questions not covered above, about internal business systems might be directed to one group
  3. questions about general computer use go to another group

This kind of “sign-posting” for users who maybe didn’t pay attention or are just new or in a hurry seems to come up loads in a huge number of places (both in my work and outside work) and it represents a large portion of wasted time (especially as it disrupts people’s focus, having to respond to trivial queries that may be misdirected). If you think about it in the Rasa Gitter context, it’s all those people who are delighted to discover Rasa (yay!), then the first thing they post is something that’s really obvious if they’d just looked at the docs, but they somehow missed them - and with some simple filtering they could have been directed to the NLU or Core forums (or even given specific responses to the most common questions)

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I think it would be really beneficial if the bot could provide explanations / walkthroughs to help users choose appropriate parameter values (epochs, augmentation factor, validation_split, etc.) for their models.

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I’d like the new bot explain how to effectively use trackers

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I’d like to see a demo where the bot can save (transcription) of conversation per user.

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I would like to know bot?

It would be great if Clarification will be implemented in Demo Bot. If confidence difference of 2 top intent is very small then it should ask for clarification using Intent Name of Predefined text for each intent. May be put 2 buttons, one for each intent.

Also I would like to see Form Action used for some skills, as it is not used in Demo Bot as per my knowledge.

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That’s a very good point @rajvirdhakhada7 we’re actually working on making our fallback policy in rasa_core smarter to do just that :slight_smile: And we experimented our new form action a bit on a seperate branch in the demo bot repo if you want to take a look:

This version of forms will be merged into rasa core master soon hopefully

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The answer is simple: a demo is supposed to demonstrate everything RASA can do.

I don’t think we need any “new ideas” for the bot. Read your documentation and your “demo bot”, and find out what is in the documentation not in the demo bot.

If you really need any ideas, here are some, just pick up from your documentation:

  • Is there any interactive learning?
  • Is there any debugging option/function/demo?
  • Is there any evaluation and testing demo there? Are all options (all means everything) included in the demo?
  • Is there a demo for predict_action_probabilities and featurize_for_training?
  • Is there a demo for every policies your bot can use?
  • Is there a demo for Featurization? While reading your documentation are there any example/demo on how to set it up and what if we tune some params and what result will get?
  • Is there any demo for Spacy/Mitic/Tensorflow or if we want to have our own pipeline, is there a demo?
  • Is there a demo pipeline so that we can clean up the text before feeding it to bot? And any demo there to get the response from a custom NLU module so that we can set it back to visitor?

…to name a few here.

To me: Demo simple means showing everything your bot can do, and how is it implemented in code. That’s called demo.

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That i think can be tweaked but ya if there’s a pre-built functionality to do the same …no harm having it

How about a demo bot that explains every niche of rasa nlu

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@alucard001 that’s all well and great (though frankly i don’t appreciate your tone), but the bot is also there for people to chat to, which means we need suggestions for use cases for the bot.

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@akelad

I sincerely apologize for my tone.

At the time of that writing, I am heavily struggling with using BotPress and how it works, even after reviewing the tutorial and documentation.

I am very sorry for that again.

Thank you.

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@Abir that’s a great suggestion, we’re actually working on expanding the getting started skill where we’re explaining some more aspects of NLU for beginners

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