Embedding Rasa in edge Devices: Capabilities and Limitations

Over the past few years, there has been a boost in the use of commercial virtual assistants. Obviously, these proprietary tools are well-performing, however the functionality they offer is limited, users are "vendor-locked", while possible user privacy issues rise. In this paper we argue that low-cost, open hardware solutions may also perform well, given the proper setup. Specifically, we perform an initial assessment of a low-cost virtual agent employing the Rasa framework integrated into a Raspberry Pi 4. We set up three different architectures, discuss their capabilities and limitations and evaluate the dialogue system against three axes: assistant comprehension, task success and assistant usability. Our experiments show that our low-cost virtual assistant performs in a satisfactory manner, even when a small-sized training dataset is used. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://crativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of KES International.