Domains¶

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The Domain defines the universe in which your assistant operates. It specifies the intents, entities, slots, and actions your bot should know about. Optionally, it can also include responses for the things your bot can say.

An example of a Domain
Custom Actions and Slots
Responses
Images and Buttons
Custom Output Payloads
Channel-Specific Responses
Variables
Variations
Ignoring entities for certain intents
Session configuration

An example of a Domain ¶

As an example, the DefaultDomain has the following yaml definition:

intents:
  - greet
  - goodbye
  - affirm
  - deny
  - mood_great
  - mood_unhappy
  - bot_challenge

actions:
- utter_greet
- utter_cheer_up
- utter_did_that_help
- utter_happy
- utter_goodbye
- utter_iamabot

responses:
  utter_greet:
  - text: "Hey! How are you?"

  utter_cheer_up:
  - text: "Here is something to cheer you up:"
    image: "https://i.imgur.com/nGF1K8f.jpg"

  utter_did_that_help:
  - text: "Did that help you?"

  utter_happy:
  - text: "Great, carry on!"

  utter_goodbye:
  - text: "Bye"

  utter_iamabot:
  - text: "I am a bot, powered by Rasa."

session_config:
  session_expiration_time: 60
  carry_over_slots_to_new_session: true

What does this mean?

Your NLU model will define the intents and entities that you need to include in the domain.

Slots hold information you want to keep track of during a conversation. A categorical slot called risk_level would be defined like this:

slots:
   risk_level:
      type: categorical
      values:
      - low
      - medium
      - high

Here you can find the full list of slot types defined by Rasa Core, along with syntax for including them in your domain file.

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

respond to a user,
make an external API call,
query a database, or
just about anything!

Custom Actions and Slots ¶

To reference slots in your domain, you need to reference them by their module path. To reference custom actions, use their name. For example, if you have a module called my_actions containing a class MyAwesomeAction, and module my_slots containing MyAwesomeSlot, you would add these lines to the domain file:

actions:
  - my_custom_action
  ...

slots:
  - my_slots.MyAwesomeSlot

The name function of MyAwesomeAction needs to return my_custom_action in this example (for more details, see Custom Actions).

Responses ¶

Responses are messages the bot will send back to the user. There are two ways to use these responses:

If the name of the response starts with utter_, the response can directly be used as an action. You would add the response to the domain:
```
responses:
  utter_greet:
  - text: "Hey! How are you?"
```
Afterwards, you can use the response as an action in the stories:
```
## greet the user
* intent_greet
  - utter_greet
```
When utter_greet is run as an action, it will send the message from the response back to the user.
You can use the responses to generate response messages from your custom actions using the dispatcher: dispatcher.utter_message(template="utter_greet"). This allows you to separate the logic of generating the messages from the actual copy. In your custom action code, you can send a message based on the response like this:
```
from rasa_sdk.actions import Action

class ActionGreet(Action):
  def name(self):
      return 'action_greet'

  def run(self, dispatcher, tracker, domain):
      dispatcher.utter_message(template="utter_greet")
      return []
```

Images and Buttons ¶

Responses defined in a domain’s yaml file can contain images and buttons as well:

responses:
  utter_greet:
  - text: "Hey! How are you?"
    buttons:
    - title: "great"
      payload: "great"
    - title: "super sad"
      payload: "super sad"
  utter_cheer_up:
  - text: "Here is something to cheer you up:"
    image: "https://i.imgur.com/nGF1K8f.jpg"

Note

Please keep in mind that it is up to the implementation of the output channel on how to display the defined buttons. The command line, for example, can’t display buttons or images, but tries to mimic them by printing the options.

Custom Output Payloads ¶

You can also send any arbitrary output to the output channel using the custom: key. Note that since the domain is in yaml format, the json payload should first be converted to yaml format.

For example, although date pickers are not a defined parameter in responses because they are not supported by most channels, a Slack date picker can be sent like so:

responses:
  utter_take_bet:
  - custom:
      blocks:
      - type: section
        text:
          text: "Make a bet on when the world will end:"
          type: mrkdwn
        accessory:
          type: datepicker
          initial_date: '2019-05-21'
          placeholder:
            type: plain_text
            text: Select a date

Channel-Specific Responses ¶

For each response, you can have multiple response templates (see Variations). If you have certain response templates that you would like sent only to specific channels, you can specify this with the channel: key. The value should match the name defined in the name() method of the channel’s OutputChannel class. Channel-specific responses are especially useful if creating custom output payloads that will only work in certain channels.

responses:
  utter_ask_game:
  - text: "Which game would you like to play?"
    channel: "slack"
    custom:
      - # payload for Slack dropdown menu to choose a game
  - text: "Which game would you like to play?"
    buttons:
    - title: "Chess"
      payload: '/inform{"game": "chess"}'
    - title: "Checkers"
      payload: '/inform{"game": "checkers"}'
    - title: "Fortnite"
      payload: '/inform{"game": "fortnite"}'

Each time your bot looks for responses, it will first check to see if there are any channel-specific response templates for the connected channel. If there are, it will choose only from these response templates. If no channel-specific response templates are found, it will choose from any response templates that do not have a defined channel. Therefore, it is good practice to always have at least one response template for each response that has no channel specified so that your bot can respond in all environments, including in the shell and in interactive learning.

Variables ¶

You can also use variables in your responses to insert information collected during the dialogue. You can either do that in your custom python code or by using the automatic slot filling mechanism. For example, if you have a response like this:

responses:
  utter_greet:
  - text: "Hey, {name}. How are you?"

Rasa will automatically fill that variable with a value found in a slot called name.

In custom code, you can retrieve a response by using:

class ActionCustom(Action):
   def name(self):
      return "action_custom"

   def run(self, dispatcher, tracker, domain):
      # send utter default response to user
      dispatcher.utter_message(template="utter_default")
      # ... other code
      return []

If the response contains variables denoted with {my_variable} you can supply values for the fields by passing them as keyword arguments to utter_message:

dispatcher.utter_message(template="utter_greet", my_variable="my text")

Variations ¶

If you want to randomly vary the response sent to the user, you can list multiple response templates and Rasa will randomly pick one of them, e.g.:

responses:
  utter_greeting:
  - text: "Hey, {name}. How are you?"
  - text: "Hey, {name}. How is your day going?"

Ignoring entities for certain intents ¶

If you want all entities to be ignored for certain intents, you can add the use_entities: [] parameter to the intent in your domain file like this:

intents:
  - greet:
      use_entities: []

To ignore some entities or explicitly take only certain entities into account you can use this syntax:

intents:
- greet:
    use_entities:
      - name
      - first_name
    ignore_entities:
      - location
      - age

This means that excluded entities for those intents will be unfeaturized and therefore will not impact the next action predictions. This is useful when you have an intent where you don’t care about the entities being picked up. If you list your intents as normal without this parameter, the entities will be featurized as normal.

Note

If you really want these entities not to influence action prediction we suggest you make the slots with the same name of type unfeaturized.

Session configuration ¶

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

the user begins the conversation with the assistant,

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

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. 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:

session_config:
  session_expiration_time: 60  # value in minutes, 0 means infinitely long
  carry_over_slots_to_new_session: true  # set to false to forget slots between sessions

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).

Note

A session start triggers the default action action_session_start. Its default implementation moves all existing slots into the new session. Note that all conversations begin with an action_session_start. Overriding this action could for instance be used to initialise the tracker with slots from an external API call, or to start the conversation with a bot message. The docs on Customising the session start action shows you how to do that.