How can you create your RASA custom Actions as Asynchronous

In this current era of Artificial Intelligence, lots of businesses are shifting towards developing chatbots. Chatbots are fast and they also give you a sense of belongingness. 

There are lots of framework which can help you with chatbot development, RASA is one of them. RASA is an open source framework to build Chatbots. To make bots more versatile we usually have to create multiple intents, entities and custom actions. Once your bot expands its scope, there are chances that the number of users increase drastically. This can sometimes result in slower response time from your bots. To make sure that your bot is processing every response in parallel you have to make your custom actions ASYNCHRONOUS.

Lets see how we can make our RASA custom actions async...

To achieve this we just have to follow two steps.

• Add the async keyword in front of run method of your custom action

class ActionMyCustomAction(Action):

    def name(self):

        return "action_my_custom_action"

    async def run(self, dispatcher, tracker, domain):

        '''

         write your code here

        '''

        return []                         

Here we have just created our run function as asynchronous.

• Make all function calls and API calls as asynchronous from this run method of your action.
• To create function calls as asynchronous you have to make the function asynchronous by adding async keyword. Then use await keyword to call that function. 
• Example:

                await asyncio.sleep(5)

• To create API calls as asynchronous, you can use aiohttp library.
• Following is an example of my code:

import asyncio from aiohttp 

import ClientSession 

async with ClientSession(headers=headers) as session: 

    async with session.post(url=url, json={"message": "hello"}) as response: 

        response = await response.text()

    For better understanding of aiohttp click here. 

I hope this article helped. Please comment if you have any doubt. I'll try my best to resolve it. 

To understand more about rasa click here.

Happy coding!!!