In this workshop, you will get hands-on experience in developing intelligent AI assistants based entirely on machine learning and using only open source tools - Rasa NLU and Rasa Core. You will learn the fundamentals of conversational AI and the best practices of developing AI assistants that scale and learn from real conversational data.
AI assistants are getting a great deal of attention from the industry as well as the research. However, the majority of assistants built to this day are still developed using a state machine and a set of rules. That doesn’t scale in production.
In this workshop, you are going to take a different approach and build an intelligent assistant without any predefined rules. Instead, using open source libraries Rasa NLU and Rasa Core, you’ll build an assistant which learns by observing real conversations. At the end of this workshop, you will have built an engaging and fully functioning conversational assistant based entirely on machine learning. The workshop will consist of the following stages:
Stage 1: Natural language understanding. You will start with language understanding, bootstrapping from very little annotated training data. In this stage, you will also tackle the challenges of going beyond pretrained word vectors for NLU and enabling the assistant to capture more than one intention per user input.
Stage 2: Dialogue management. You will use machine learning to build the AI assistant’s ability to handle increasingly complex multi-turn dialogues based on the actual conversational data. You will also enable the assistant to actually complete user-requested tasks by connecting the assistant to external APIs and using the knowledge of the outside world to steer the conversation.
Stage 3: Closing the feedback loop. In the last section, you will close the feedback loop by improving the performance of the assistant by using the interactive learning and a real-time user feedback.
The attendees of this workshop will learn the fundamentals of building conversational AI, the foundations of machine learning models behind the NLU and dialogue management, the best practices of preparing training data and developing intelligent AI assistants that scale.
The slides of the workshop
You can find the slides of this workshop here.
Setup of the workshop:
During this workshop, we are going to use Jupyter notebooks and other files in this directory https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa-workshop-pydata-dc . If you want to be extra ready, you can follow the installation instructions provided in a readme of this repository.
If you don't want to run things on your local machine or if something is not going to work as expected, you can grab this Google Colab and use it instead during the workshop: Google Colab notebook