Connecting to messaging & voice platforms¶

Here’s how to connect your conversational AI to the outside world.

Input Channels¶

Input channels are defined in the rasa_core.channels module. Currently, there is only a FacebookInput class.

A FacebookInput instance provides a flask blueprint for creating a webserver. This lets you separate the exact endpoints and implementation from your webserver creation logic.

Facebook Messenger¶

Code to create a Messenger-compatible webserver looks like this:

from rasa_core.channels import HttpInputChannel
from rasa_core.channels.facebook import FacebookInput
from rasa_core.agent import Agent
from rasa_core.interpreter import RegexInterpreter

# load your trained agent
agent = Agent.load("examples/babi/models/policy/current", interpreter=RegexInterpreter())

input_channel = FacebookInput(
   fb_verify="YOUR_FB_VERIFY",
   fb_secret="YOUR_FB_SECRET",
   fb_tokens=["YOUR_FB_PAGE_TOKEN"],
   debug_mode=True
)

# or `agent.handle_channel(...)` for synchronous handling
agent.handle_asynchronous(HttpInputChannel(5004, "/app", input_channel))

The arguments for the FacebookInput constructor are as follows, reading the messenger docs probably helps too.

fb_verify this is a token you define, and tell facebook about, to confirm your URL wants to receive webhooks
fb_secret your app secret. this is used to check the webhook really came from facebook
page_tokens this is a dict of {page_id: page_token} pairs, containing all the pages for which you want to handle messages.
debug_mode True or False

The arguments for the HttpInputChannel are the port, the url prefix, and the input channel. The default endpoint for receiving facebook messenger messages is /webhook, so the example above would listen for messages on /app/webhook. This is the url you should add in the facebook developer portal.