Rasa as a fallback skill?

Plugins & Skills Feedback / Support
1

I’ve been running mycroft on a respeaker core v2 and have integrated it with my robot running ROS . I intend to do a writeup on how to integrate ROS with mycroft… wasn’t very hard but I did have to modify mycroft source code a small amount. But at this time, mycroft won’t startup properly unless ROS is already up and running on the main machine, so I need to figure out how to handle that before I post my solution (mycroft starts quicker than the main machine starts ROS).

As for the ROS integration, I have a mycroft skill that accepts commands (examples below), sends them to ROS and plays back the responses that ROS returns:

  • Turn around
  • To to twin’s room
  • What is your battery level
  • Move forward 1 meter

This works really well, but the robot doesn’t have much to offer at the moment other than to follow commands. I am still very new to mycroft and not entirely sure I understand how it all works, so please bear with me if I’m off-base on things. I’m interested in using Rasa to provide a level of conversation capability to the robot, but jamesmf’s skill requires that the user enter chat mode and then exit it when done.

Before I embark on trying to do this, is there any reason that the Rasa skill could not become a fallback skill? That is, when talking to mycroft, it will pass my robot commands (e.g., turn around) to the ROS skill and everything else would get passed to the rasa skill as a fallback? If so, would this remove the need of having to start and stop a chat?

2

I suggest that you look here for a similar but (in my view) cleaner solution:

I implemented this in a Rasa-X Docker stack + Mycroft container. It works nice except this: Mycroft repreats the last bot response after receiving no input for 5 secs (which is annoying). If you find a similar problem, please drop a message in the thread I made regarding this issue.

3

Thanks for that link. However, I ran into a great deal of complexity with just getting Rasa running and see it has a pretty big learning curve. I also think I misunderstood it’s use case… I just needed a basic chit-chat bot and its clearly much more than that. After getting the AIML chatbot from the mycroft marketplace installed and working, it sort of does the job… better than nothing by far.