Configuring the working environment

Now that you are familiar with key building blocks of CALM, it's time to see how you can use Rasa Pro to start building your own custom conversational AI assistant. Rasa Pro extends Rasa Open Source and adds all of the capabilities of CALM, Rasa's conversational AI with language models. In this chapter, we're going to look at how you can get started with building your own custom conversational AI assistant. All of the instructions that we are going to cover in this chapter are also available in the Rasa Pro documentation.

Creating an example project#

The easiest way to get started with building your assistant is by running the command:

rasa init --template tutorial

This command will create the project directory for your CALM project and even provide a very simple example of an assistant built with CALM that you can either use as an example or even use this example project to start building your own custom assistant. This tutorial contains an assistant that is built for completing tasks like money transfer and others. This command will create an example project folder for you.

Interacting with the example assistant#

Once you have created the example project folder using the last command, you will be able to code along with this tutorial. It is a fully functioning AI assistant that is capable of completing very simple tasks like transferring money and others.

By following the prompt in the command line you will be able train the example assistant and interact with it. Most importantly, you will be able to see all of the files under the hood used to create this assistant.

You will see an example of flows, an example of domain, even the implementation of some custom actions. We will cover these files and configurations in more detail a little bit later in the series.