Run your Conversational Agent

Owned by Gardner, I.V. (Bella)
Last updated: Jan 08, 2024 by Koen Hindriks
3 min read

There are two parts to getting your conversational agent up and running. The first part consists of launching the basic SIC infrastructure. We need to launch the Dialogflow and web server components of the infrastructure, which are both used in this project. The second part consists of launching your MARBEL agent, which implements the dialog manager and webpage, and connecting it to the SIC infrastructure.

Once you have the SIC infrastructure up and running, you do not need to relaunch SIC every time. You can thus skip the first part once that has been done. For each change that you make to your MARBEL agent, of course, you need to restart it to see the effects of those changes.

First part: Launch the SIC infrastructure

  • Open a command terminal in your machine and navigate to the folder (called docker by default) where you cloned the SICproject.

Make sure you have Docker up and running before you proceed!

  • Enter docker-compose up dialogflow webserver and hit enter.

  • You should see something like this if it works.

  • Open a second terminal and navigate to the subfolder sic-local in the docker folder.

  • Enter java -jar computer-browser.jar and hit enter. After running java -jar computer-browser.jar a pop-up should appear like the one in the left-hand corner of the picture below. Click okay without filling in a username and password.

  • The top left corner screen should pop up.

  • Then a Google Chrome window should open. It should say it is being controlled by automated test software and displays a long string of random characters. In your terminal, it should say ‘ChromeDriver was started successfully’ in one of the lines.

Do not close the terminals you used for launching the SIC infrastructure. You can inspect these terminals too to see what is going on with Dialogflow, for example.

If the Chrome browser shows Disconnected, you need to relaunch the SIC infrastructure. You can use the docker-compose down command in a terminal to clean up your docker engine.

Second part: Launch the MARBEL agent

  • Launch the .mas2g file in your agent project, for example, by right-clicking on it and choosing Debug As → MARBEL from the menu. A popup should appear like the one in the left-hand corner of the picture below. The empty box in the popup next to the browser code should be ticked. Note: The browser code should match the code that is displayed in the Google Chrome window used by the agent. Finally, hit OK.