ravestate 0.5.1

Ravestate is a reactive library for real-time natural language dialog systems.

About

   ____                          __      __        _____       _____   
  / _  \____  __  ______  ______/ /_____/ /___    /_   _\     /_   _\  
 / /_/ / __ \/ / / / __ \/ ___\, / __ \, / __ \    0>  0>     <0  <0   
/ ,\ ,/ /_/ /\ \/ / /_/ /\__, / / /_/ / / /_/ /   \__⊽__/     \__⊽__/  
\/  \/\__/\/  \__/ ,___/\____/\/\__/\/\/ ,___/       ⋂  - Hey!   ⋂     
                 \____/                \____/             Olà! -       

Ravestate is a reactive library for real-time natural language dialog systems. It combines elements from event-based and reactive programming into an API, where application states are defined as functions that are run when a certain boolean set of criteria (signals) in the current application context is satisfied. It is the first reactive API to allow for boolean combinations of events.

Reactive Hello World

from ravestate.context import startup, Context
from ravestate.state import state
from ravestate.module import Module

# We want to write some text output, so we
# need the raw:out context property from ravestate_rawio.
from ravestate_rawio import output as raw_out

# Make sure that we use some i/o implementation,
# so we can actually see stuff that is written to rawio:out.
import ravestate_conio

# Ravestate applications should always be wrapped in a Module.
# This allows easier scoping, and enables separation of concerns
# beyond states.
with Module(name="hi!"):

    # Create an application state which reacts to the `:startup` signal,
    # and writes a string to raw:out. Note: State functions are
    # always run asynchronously!
    @state(cond=startup(min_age=3.), write=raw_out.id())
    def hello_world(context):
        context[raw_out.id()] = "Waddup waddup waddup!"

# Run context with console input/output and our 'hi!' module.
Context("conio", "hi!").run()

Installation

Via PIP

The easiest way to install ravestate is through pip:

pip install ravestate

Note: Ravestate requires Python 3.6 or higher. It is tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, as well as macOS > High Sierra. It is currently not tested on Windows.

For reliability, we recommend using an environment virtualization tool, like virtualenv or conda.

For developers

First, install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

# To run tests, install pytest, mocking, fixtures...
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Then, you may open the repository in any IDE, and mark the modules folder as a sources root. Alternatively for development purposes, call export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$(pwd)/modules from your ravestate clone, to tell python that there are modules to be loaded in the modules directory (the IDE does this for you).

Running Hello World

Ravestate applications are defined by a configuration, which specifies the ravestate modules that should be loaded.

To run the basic hello world application, run ravestate with a config file or command line arguments:

Running with command line spec

You can easily run a combination of ravestate modules in a shared context, by listing them as arguments to the rasta command, which is installed with ravestate:

python3 -m ravestate \
    ravestate_wildtalk \
    ravestate_conio \
    ravestate_hibye \
    ravestate_akinator

Run python3 -m ravestate -h to see more options!

Running with config file(s)

You may specify a series of config files to configure ravestate context, when specifying everything through the command line becomes too laborious:

# In file hello_world.yml
module: core
config:
  import:
    - ravestate_wildtalk
    - ravestate_conio
    - ravestate_hibye
    - ravestate_akinator

Then, run ravestate with this config file:

python3 -m ravestate -f hello_world.yml

Module overview

Ravestate offers a landscape of fine-grained modules for different aspects of dialog application tasks, which may be seen in the following dependency diagram. Broadly, the modules are categorized into Core (Blue), I/O (Yellow), External (Red) and Skills (Green):

Core Modules

Module name	Description
ravestate	Core ravestate library.
ravestate_rawio	Provides raw_in, raw_out, pic_in properties, which are served by the IO modules.
ravestate_ontology	Connects to scientio to serve a built-in ontology.
ravestate_interloc	Provides the all_interlocutors property, where present interlocutors are registered by the IO modules.
ravestate_idle	Provides bored and impatient signals, as specified here.
ravestate_verbaliser	Utilities for easy management of conversational text, documented here.
ravestate_nlp	Spacy-based NLP properties and signals, documented here.
ravestate_ros2	Provides specific Ros2PubProperty, Ros2SubProperty and Ros2CallProperty context props., which greatly simplify working with ROS2 in ravestate.

IO Modules

Module name	Description
ravestate_conio	Simple command-line based IO for development purposes.
ravestate_telegramio	Single- or Multi-process Telegram server module, documented here.
ravestate_roboyio	PyroBoy -based STT/TTS with ROS2.

Skill Modules

Module name	Description
ravestate_wildtalk	ParlAI -based generative conversational module.
ravestate_hibye	Simply voices Hi! (or the likes thereof) when an interlocutor is added, and Bye when one is removed.
ravestate_genqa	DrQA -based general question answering module.
ravestate_roboyqa	QA module which provides answers to questions about Roboy, such as Who is your dad?
ravestate_akinator	Enables dialog-based play of Akinator!
ravestate_sendpics	Uses face recognition to extract facial features and an assiciated Person with pic_in and ontology, which are then persisted in Redis and Scientio.
ravestate_stalker	Uses facial feature <-> person tuples generated by sendpics, to surprise people in front of a camera with knowledge of their names.

Running tests

If you have installed the dependencies from requirements-dev.txt you may run the ravestate test suite as follows:

./run_tests.sh

Building/maintaining the docs

If you have installed the dependencies from requirements-dev.txt, generate the docs by running this command at project root:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$(pwd)/modules
git rm -rf docs
rm -rf _build docs
pydocmd build
mkdir -p docs/resources/docs && cp resources/docs/*.png docs/resources/docs
git add docs/*
# For inspection: python3 -m http.server --directory docs

The structure and content of the docs are defined in the file pydocmd.yml.