Warning: This document is for an old version of Rasa Core.

Plumbing - How it all fits together

This diagram shows the basic steps of how a Rasa Core app responds to a message:

../_images/intro_1.png

The steps are:

  1. The message is received and passed to an Interpreter, which converts it into a dictionary including the original text, the intent, and any entities that were found.
  2. The Tracker is the object which keeps track of conversation state. It receives the info that a new message has come in.
  3. The policy receives the current state of the tracker
  4. The policy chooses which action to take next.
  5. The chosen action is logged by the tracker
  6. A response is sent to the user

Note

Messages can be text typed by a human, but can equally well be a button payload, or a message that’s already been interpreted (as you would get from an Amazon Echo). See the section on Interpreters for details.

The steps above are carried out by the Controller, which adds messages to a queue as they come in, and asynchronously works through the message queue to respond to users. In most cases, you shouldn’t have to worry at all about this, but the details are explained in message_handling.

Now check out the A Quick Tour (no ML) and A Bot From Scratch!