Foreword

Conversational AI combines ideas from linguistics, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to develop voice and chat assistants for a near-infinite set of use cases. Since 2016 there has been a surge in interest in this field, driven by widespread adoption of mobile chat applications. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated this trend, with almost all one-on-one interactions becoming digital.

2016 was also the year Rasa was first released and we saw the first community contributions come in on GitHub. Open source communities live and die by their users and contributors, and this is doubly true for Rasa,where our global community builds assistants in hundreds of human languages. Xiaoquan Kong and Guan Wang have been leading members of our community for years and I am grateful for their many contributions. Not least Xiaoquan's efforts to ensure Rasa has robust support for building assistants in Mandarin. I've been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book.

Rasa in Action: Building Open-source Conversational AI covers precisely the topics required to become proficient at building real-world applications with Rasa.Aside from covering the fundamentals of natural language understanding and dialogue management, the book emphasizes the real-world context of building great products. In the first chapter, you are challenged to think whether a conversational experience is even the right one to build.The book also covers the essential process of Conversation-Driven Development, without which many assistants get built but fail to serve their intended users. Additionally, readers are taught practical skills like debugging an assistant, writing tests, and deploying an assistant to production.

This book will be of great use for anyone starting out as a Rasa developer, and I'm sure many existing Rasa developers will discover things they didn't know.

——Alan Nichol,co-founder and CTO,Rasa