Rasa with Botium

Having created a slackbot with GCP, Alexa Skills, and Google Assistant Apps, it was time to look at Rasa and Botium.

Rasa and Botium are both Open-Source.

Rasa is a general chatbot framework, while Botium is a generic chatbot testing framework.

Both can be added into existing frameworks via webhooks.

Contents

The contents are as follows:

• Rasa
• Botium
• Privacy
• Reference
  • Why Rasa
  • Rasa Docs
  • Rasa Changelog
  • Rasa Blog
  • Botium Blog
  • Botium testing with BDD
• To Do

Rasa

Rasa describes itself as "Built for developers, by developers".

One innovation of the Rasa Stack is that it depends upon an over-arching concept called a story:

http://rasa.com/docs/core/stories/

Other frameworks have roughly similiar approaches, but they are never as explicit.

Check out my Rasa testing with Docker.

Botium

Botium describes itself as "The Selenium for Chatbots".

It offers a number of integrations (which it refers to as "connectors"), both for testing Alexa Skills as well as Dialogflow apps.

Privacy

For my slackbot I used Wit.ai - which is owned by Facebook.

For my Alexa Skills I used Alexa - which is owned by Amazon.

For my Google Assistant Apps I used Dialogflow - which is owned by Google.

While I have not personally used it, there is also LUIS - which is owned by Microsoft.

For anyone remotely concerned about privacy, being able to track user data and how it is processed via Open-Source code is definitely worth considering.

Reference

A selection of useful references follows.

Why Rasa

For a good summary of "Why Rasa?" the following article is worth a read:

http://medium.com/rasa-blog/do-it-yourself-nlp-for-bot-developers-2e2da2817f3d

[The article also has some details on the underpinnings of Rasa.]

And the Rasa Blog version:

http://blog.rasa.com/do-it-yourself-nlp-for-bot-developers/

[The Medium.com version some interesting comments - which the Rasa Blog version does not.]

Rasa Docs

The documentation for Rasa may be found here:

http://rasa.com/docs/

Rasa Changelog

The changelog for Rasa may be found here:

http://rasa.com/docs/rasa/changelog/

Rasa Blog

Some useful articles on Rasa and chatbots can be found on their blog:

http://blog.rasa.com

Botium Blog

Some useful articles on Botium can be found on their blog:

http://www.botium.at/blog.html

Botium testing with BDD

The following article seems to give a good grounding on BDD with Cucumber & Gherkin:

http://www.sitepoint.com/bdd-javascript-cucumber-gherkin/

To Do

• Investigate Rasa
• More testing with Rasa
• Test Botium Connector for Alexa
• Test Botium Connector for Dialogflow
• Investigate Botium BDD Samples