Tracking Conversation State¶

The DialogueStateTracker is the stateful object which keeps track of a conversation. The only way the tracker should ever be updated is by passing events to the update method. For example:

>>> from rasa_core.trackers import DialogueStateTracker
>>> from rasa_core.slots import TextSlot
>>> from rasa_core.events import SlotSet

>>> tracker = DialogueStateTracker("default", slots=[TextSlot("cuisine")])
>>> print(tracker.slots)
{u'cuisine': <TextSlot(cuisine: None)>}
>>> tracker.update(SlotSet("cuisine","Mexican"))
>>> print(tracker.slots)
{u'cuisine': <TextSlot(cuisine: Mexican)>}

The full set of events is documented in the Events API documentation.

Persisting Trackers:¶

When you’re running your bot in production, you want your application to be stateless. For example, you wouldn’t want to lose track of every conversation each time you restart a running process. That’s why Rasa persists trackers in a key-value store. For testing, the InMemoryTrackerStore is sufficient, but in production you would want to use the RedisTrackerStore to restore after restarting the application. It’s straightforward to define a custom TrackerStore subclass for the persistence tool of your choice.

Serialisation¶

Rather than pickling the final state of the tracker object, Rasa creates a dialogue object to serialise. A dialogue is a full record of the previous N dialogue turns. To return to the current state of the conversation, we iterate over the turns and log the events in each.

We use the jsonpickle library to serialise these Dialogues. Here’s a simple example of a dialogue as it would be stored in the TrackerStore:

{  
  "py/object":"rasa_core.conversation.Dialogue",
  "events":[
    {
      "py/object": "rasa_core.events.UserUttered",
      "entities": [],
      "intent": {
        "name": "greet",
        "confidence": 1.0
      },
      "text": "_greet"
    },
    {
      "py/object": "rasa_core.events.ActionExecuted",
      "action_name": "utter_greet",
      "unpredictable": false
    }
  ],
  "name":"hello_world"
}