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Using NLU Only

Find out how to use only Rasa NLU as a standalone NLU service for your chatbot or virtual assistant.

NLU-based assistants

This section refers to building NLU-based assistants. If you are working with Conversational AI with Language Models (CALM), this content may not apply to you.

If you want to use Rasa only as an NLU component, you can!

Training NLU-only models

To train an NLU model only, run:

rasa train nlu

This will look for NLU training data files in the data/ directory and saves a trained model in the models/ directory. The name of the model will start with nlu-.

Testing your NLU model on the command line

To try out your NLU model on the command line, run the following command:

rasa shell nlu

This will start the rasa shell and ask you to type in a message to test. You can keep typing in as many messages as you like.

Alternatively, you can leave out the nlu argument and pass in a nlu-only model directly:

rasa shell -m models/nlu-20190515-144445.tar.gz

Running an NLU server

To start a server with your NLU model, pass in the model name at runtime:

rasa run --enable-api -m models/nlu-20190515-144445.tar.gz

You can then request predictions from your model using the /model/parse endpoint. To do this, run:

curl localhost:5005/model/parse -d '{"text":"hello"}'