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September 21st, 2020

Introducing Rasa for Beginners

  • portrait of Mady Mantha

    Mady Mantha

We're excited to launch Rasa for Beginners: a free, introductory, hands-on course that will help you build your first functional and interactive AI assistant. The course is available on Udemy, and it covers foundational concepts in natural language understanding and using machine learning to guide your assistant's next actions in the conversation. During the 2-hour course, you'll create a new Rasa project, add training data, and train your first machine learning model. The project you'll build is a bot that logs daily wellness data to a spreadsheet (using the Airtable API), to help the user keep track of their health goals.

After building a basic assistant, we show you how to take things to the next level by adding custom actions and forms. Then you'll connect the assistant to a messaging channel-Twilio-so users can talk to the assistant via text message.

But that's only the beginning. The course ends with perhaps the most important takeaway of all: how to build AI assistants that engage in natural-sounding conversations, iteratively improve over time, and really help users.

In addition, we'll cover the concepts of Conversation-Driven Development. In our experience, the most successful assistants incorporate learnings and training data from real-life conversations to improve the model over time. We'll show you how to use real conversations to take your assistant to the next level.

If you're building your very first Rasa assistant, this class is for you. By the end of this course, you'll have built a chatbot that can handle real-world tasks and create an engaging experience for your users.

We created Rasa for Beginners for everyone, but with a particular person in mind: someone starting their journey into learning more about developing with Rasa. Once you've completed Rasa for Beginners, you'll be ready for the next step: the Rasa Certification Workshop. This workshop will deepen your understanding of Rasa through more than 7 hours of hands-on learning and exercises, preparing you to earn a Rasa certification. We run Rasa Certification Workshops regularly, and would welcome you to joins us at the next event.

Also available is the Rasa Masterclass video series. The Masterclass covers all things Rasa in a series of 12 videos, comes with an accompanying Masterclass Handbook. With more than 150,000 views on YouTube, the Masterclass is a great resource for understanding how to build a complex assistant, including deep-dives into the machine learning components and deployment to a production server.

Sign up for Rasa for Beginners here. Once you've signed up, head over to our forum. The Rasa community is made up of friendly developers from around the world. You can ask questions, find information on local meetups, and get to know other conversational AI enthusiasts. We'll see you there!