Domain

In Rasa, your domain defines the universe in which your assistant operates. Specifically, it lists:

• The responses that can be used as templated messages to send to a user.
• The custom actions that can be predicted by dialogue policies.
• The slots that act as your assistant's memory throughout a conversation.
• Session configuration parameters including inactivity timeout.

If you are building an NLU-based assistant, refer to the Domain documentation to see how intents, entities, slot mappings, and slot featurization can be configured in your domain.

Multiple Domain Files#

The domain can be defined as a single YAML file or split across multiple files in a directory. When split across multiple files, the domain contents will be read and automatically merged together. You can also manage your responses, slots, custom actions in Rasa Studio.

Using the command line interface, you can train a model with split domain files by running:

Responses#

Responses are templated messages that your assistant can send to your user. Responses can contain rich content like buttons, images, and custom json payloads. Every responses is also an action, meaning that it can be used directly in an action step in a flow. Responses can be defined directly in the domain file under the responses key. For more information on responses and how to define them, see Responses.

Actions#

Actions are the things your bot can do. For example, an action could:

• respond to a user,

• make an external API call,

• query a database, or

• just about anything!

All custom actions should be listed in your domain.

Rasa also has default actions which you do not need to list in your domain.

Slots#

Slots are your assistant's memory. They act as a key-value store which can be used to store information the user provided (e.g their home city) as well as information gathered about the outside world (e.g. the result of a database query).

Slots are defined in the slots section of your domain with their name, type and default value. Different slot types exist to restrict the possible values a slot can take.

Slot Types#

Text Slot#

A text slot can take on any string value.

• Example

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  slots:

  cuisine:

  type: text

• Allowed Values

  Any string

Boolean Slot#

A boolean slot can only take on the values true or false. This is useful when you want to store a binary value.

• Example

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  slots:

  confirmation:

  type: bool

• Allowed Values

  true or false

Categorical Slot#

A categorical slot can only take on values from a predefined set. This is useful when you want to restrict the possible values a slot can take.

If the user provides a value where the casing does not match the casing of the values defined in the domain, the value will be coerced to the correct casing. For example, if the user provides the value LOW for a slot with values low, medium, high, the value will be converted to low and stored in the slot.

If you define a categorical slot with a list of values, where multiple of the values coerce to the same value, a warning will be issued and you should remove one of the values from the set in the domain. For example, if you define a categorical slot with values low, medium, high, and Low, the value Low will be coerced to low and a warning will be issued.

• Example

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  slots:

  risk_level:

  type: categorical

  values:

  - low

  - medium

  - high

Float Slot#

A float slot can only take on floating point values. This is useful when you want to store a number with a decimal point.

• Example

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  slots:

  temperature:

  type: float

Any Slot#

This slot type can take on any value. This is useful when you want to store any type of information, including structured data like dictionaries.

• Example

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  slots:

  shopping_items:

  type: any

List Slot#

A list slot can take on a list of values. Note that the list slot type is only supported in custom actions when building an assistant with CALM. List slots cannot be filled with flows in either the collect or set_slots flow step types.

Initial slot values#

You can provide an initial value for any slot in your domain file:

Persistence of Slots during Coexistence#

In Coexistence of NLU-based and CALM systems the action action_reset_routing resets all slots and hides events from featurization for the NLU-based system policies to prevent them from seeing events that originated while CALM was active. However, you might want to share some slots that both CALM and the NLU-based system should be able to use. One use case for these slots are basic user profile slots. Both the NLU-based system and CALM should likely be able to know whether a user is logged in or not, what their user name is, or what channel they are using. If you are storing this kind of data in slots you can annotate those slot definitions with the option shared_for_coexistence: True.

Session configuration#

A conversation session represents the dialogue between the assistant and the user. Conversation sessions can begin in three ways:

1. the user begins the conversation with the assistant,

2. the user sends their first message after a configurable period of inactivity, or

3. a manual session start is triggered with the /session_start intent message.

You can define the period of inactivity after which a new conversation session is triggered in the domain under the session_config key.

Available parameters are:

• session_expiration_time defines the time of inactivity in minutes after which a new session will begin.
• carry_over_slots_to_new_session determines whether existing set slots should be carried over to new sessions.

The default session configuration looks as follows:

This means that if a user sends their first message after 60 minutes of inactivity, a new conversation session is triggered, and that any existing slots are carried over into the new session. Setting the value of session_expiration_time to 0 means that sessions will not end (note that the action_session_start action will still be triggered at the very beginning of conversations).

Select which actions should receive domain#

To do this you must first enable selective domain in you endpoint configuration for action_endpoint in endpoints.yml.

After selective domain for custom actions is enabled, domain will be sent only to those custom actions which have specifically stated that they need it. Custom actions inheriting from rasa-sdk FormValidationAction parent class are an exception to this rule as they will always have the domain sent to them. To specify if an action needs the domain add {send_domain: true} to custom action in the list of actions in domain.yml: