Rasa Community Update: 100k+ downloads, 1,000+ members on Gitter and 100+ contributors

TL;DR: Our open source community of makers is growing very fast. The bot hype has come and gone but the real value-adding use cases are here to stay.

A community of makers

The Rasa Community is growing very fast! For example, we've seen downloads of our Rasa open source going up from 30k to 100k within 6 months. So who is behind this number? The vast majority are product teams in companies from startups to the Fortune 500 that have hit roadblocks with SaaS APIs and are instead building conversational AI in-house. They're supported by an amazing group of community members on Gitter and Github who answer their questions about Rasa.

The industry has moved beyond the "everything-should-be-a-bot" hype. For the use cases that work and actually add value to the end user, we see a pattern of product teams across industries from insurance to healthcare wanting to expand their bots to do more than answer FAQs. For example, allowing policy holders to file a claim end-to-end with an insurance bot requires a lot of back-and-forth and deep backend integrations. Apart from customer service automation, we see community members building exciting use cases around lead generation & sales as well as internal process automation.

Contributors become Heroes

We are thrilled to have over 100 contributors - the heart of our community. Thanks to everyone who either committed code or created resources for the community! Ever since we open sourced Rasa Core, contributors have committed a lot of great code to solve their edge cases when using Rasa "in the wild".

Apart from code contributions, we've seen many new exciting community projects popping up that build on top of Rasa. For example, Articulate provides a GUI that allows non-technical people to train an NLU model. In addition, we've seen excellent tutorials as additions to our docs that help developers get started.

We've also introduced Rasa Heroes - a group of currently 33 people who have made multiple high-quality contributions to the Rasa Community. Heroes have access to a Slack channel where we discuss latest updates, features and our product roadmap. They also get a free Rasa T-Shirt. :-) We're looking forward to expanding the group of Heroes so keep on contributing!

Community + Research = Conversational AI that works

We'll continue to reinvent our own tools (like we just did with NLU) so that product teams can build more sophisticated conversational AI. Our research pipeline is filled with exciting new projects that we can't wait to get your feedback on!

We believe that conversational AI is early and the best way to push the status quo is to learn from people building useful bots and solving their challenges with great product development and applied research. So thanks everyone who is a part of our amazing community!

So what are you building? We'd love to hear from you! Join our community forum!