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Connecting to Messaging and Voice Channels

Installation Requirements

To use most channel connectors, you need to install the channels dependency group:

pip install 'rasa-pro[channels]'

For more information about dependency groups, see our Python Versions and Dependencies reference page.

Connecting to A Channel​

Text & Chat​

Learn how to make your assistant available on:

Voice​

Learn how to build voice assistants with:

To learn more about integration ASR and TTS engines, head over to Speech Integrations.

For how Rasa spaces consecutive bot audio on voice stream channels (minimum gaps and silence between messages), see Minimum pacing between bot messages (voice streams).

Testing Channels on Your Local Machine​

If you're running a Rasa server on localhost, most external channels won't be able to find your server URL, since localhost is not open to the internet.

To make a port on your local machine publicly available on the internet, you can use ngrok. Alternatively, see this list tracking and comparing other tunneling solutions.

After installing ngrok, run:

ngrok http 5005; rasa run

When you follow the instructions to make your assistant available on a channel, use the ngrok URL. Specifically, wherever the instructions say to use https://<host>:<port>/webhooks/<CHANNEL>/webhook, use <ngrok_url>/webhooks/<CHANNEL>/webhook, replacing <ngrok_url> with the randomly generated URL displayed in your ngrok terminal window. For example, if connecting your bot to Slack, your URL should resemble https://26e7e7744191.ngrok.io/webhooks/slack/webhook.

caution

With the free-tier of ngrok, you can run into limits on how many connections you can make per minute. As of writing this, it is set to 40 connections / minute.

Alternatively you can make your assistant listen on a specific address using the -i command line option:

rasa run -p 5005 -i 192.168.69.150

This is particularly useful when your internet facing machines connect to backend servers using a VPN interface.

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