Exploration of Virtual Agents for R Shiny

[bastianilso]

Working Questions:

• What is Rasa, and how is it written?
• What integration support exists between Rasa and R? (is it available as an R package, or can it be used from JS..?)

Different potential possibilities to explore:

• Is there a specific R packages that facilitate integrating Rasa into R?
• Can Rasa generally speaking can be used for web applications? in that case, what is needed (is it just a script we can import via e.g. <script> . In that case, how does data flow "into" Rasa from the web dashboard?

[Andy31700]

• What is Rasa, and how is it written?

Rasa is an open-source machine learning framework for creating custom AI chatbots. Rasa is written in Python

• What integration support exists between Rasa and R? (is it available as an R package, or can it be used from JS..?)

I didn't find any R package that allows the integration of Rasa. It is possible to integrate the chatbot using a .js or another solution would be to use botfront or Chatbot-widget.

[bastianilso]

Thanks @Andy31700 ! Here's some next steps:

1. Your next goal should be to create an initial implementation of a Rasa chatbot and upload it to this git repository.
2. It would be nice if you could create a simple HTML website which try to integrate the chatbot.
3. Later on, we will try to migrate the chatbot to R, and explore the challenges that lies in doing so.

Once Milo is back from travel, he might have further guidelines and tasks for you. 🙂

[Andy31700]

Here is how the rasa chatbot looks on an html page.

[bastianilso]

Nice @Andy31700 ! Is the <script> in index.html at line 9 what is embedding the chatbot? https://github.com/med-material/web-dashboard-virtual-agent/blob/main/HTML_Chatbot/index.html#L9 In that case, I think you should take a look at R and R Shiny and try to integrate the chatbot in a basic R Shiny application.

[Andy31700]

I just managed to integrate the chatbot on the dashboard using R, here is the rendering :

[bastianilso]

Great @Andy31700, we should show this to Milo. I think the next step is for you to talk with Hamzah. In the meantime, a few questions for you to answer:

• Can we somehow give the chatbot knowledge of what is currently being seen on the dashboard?
• Can we access what the user has written with the chatbot from R?

[bastianilso]

Hi @Andy31700 I have asked Hamzah to provide you with some pointers, could you check out:

https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/connectors/your-own-website/

https://learning.rasa.com/conversational-ai-with-rasa/website-integration/

It sounds like you and him have a meeting scheduled tomorrow, so you should get some additional info by then.

[Andy31700]

I managed to record the discussion with the chatbot, so you just have to write one of the three possibilities which are :

• save the discussion
• save
• saving

Once the chat saved, the bot will answer "chat saved", at this moment a file named "chats.txt" will be created. It is also possible to modify the program to create a .csv file instead of a .txt file