Rasa Technologies
Making Great AI Assistants Easy to Build, at Scale

Our team loves working on the Rasa platform. The flexibility has produced many creative ideas, and we already have teams outside of the Care department that want to use our virtual assistant,” Lindsey McCarthy, senior technology product manager, AI at T-Mobile.

A testimonial like this doesn’t come by every day. It is earned by revolutionary innovations such as Rasa, the conversational AI framework conceptualised by co-founders Alex Weidauer and Alan Nichol. Rasa’s open-source platform is loved by everyone from startups to Fortune 500s across banking, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, e-commerce, travel and culture, and healthcare sectors.

But what does Rasa do differently to earn such clients, or for that matter, what did it take to get recognised in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant?

Because the fact of the matter is, conversational interfaces aren’t a new idea.

Enterprises are seeing the opportunity for AI assistants to become the primary way that their customers interact with them. In fact, according to Markets and Markets research, interactions with automated chatbots are steadily growing, with the global conversational AI market expected to grow to $18.4 billion by 2026.

That being the case, we need to admit that the technology doesn’t deliver on the promise of being the go-to interface for interactions. It’s still tough to build good assistants and nearly impossible to build great ones.

The founders at Rasa have a few tricks up their sleeves, paving the way to make great virtual assistants come to life.

Rasa is a full enterprise platform for building the quintessential customer experience layer—an advanced assistance layer needed in today’s day and age—where customers or teams across a company need bots that are expected to solve almost any query they have through various channels.

This is easier said than done, considering that organisations have multiple ways to provide services to their customers, including numerous teams getting into the act.

Cumbersome? Yes.

Rasa provides the framework to build conversational AI the way an enterprise would build any other product. But why Rasa takes the cake is because Rasa is an independent setup–a fully modular, extensible, end to end conversational platform–where different teams such as dialogue designers, content teams, marketing teams, and developers are not inhibited by any hurdle to provide their insights for the end product, ensuring no one is re-inventing the wheel. Rasa as a platform is language-agnostic, coming from a European setup--a continent housing people who speak multiple languages. The firm also ensures that it accommodates an omnichannel customer experience setup if an enterprise requires it. In short, Rasa provides customers with the necessary assistance to ensure they are not left dumbfounded when they need to evolve their conversational AI interface.

Rasa’s platform is highly customisable. Since it’s a platform that will be used in house by an enterprise and is on-premise, the data used is highly secure, even that of the customers. Apart from providing the customer experience layer, Rasa’s platform can also be used to build interfaces between multiple teams to streamline operations and gather insights into current and potential customer interests to provide customised services or products.

Perhaps this is why so many enterprises seek to collaborate with Rasa, which includes T-Mobile, Lemonade, N26, and another famous name, JPMorgan Chase. Rasa collaborated with the JP Morgan Chase digital assistant team and, for their efforts, have been inducted into the JPMorgan Chase Hall of innovation.

With all that said and done, what Rasa has accomplished is just the tip of the iceberg. They have opened the doors to unknown possibilities. To explore further, the team continues to invest in high-quality educational material, which is free for the whole open source community. This is about Rasa and the underlying algorithms and adjacent machine learning topics accessible through their YouTube channel and blog. “The great thing about Rasa is that it’s a journey of discovery, and you can learn more and get more out of it,” smiles Nichol. And that ties back to the company’s mission, “make great assistants easy to build”.