Bowne-Anderson, Nichol, & Petraitytė – Building an AI Travel Agent That Never Hallucinates

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LMs offer powerful capabilities, but deploying them effectively in production remains a challenge for conversational AI and Chatbot applications, especially when it comes to minimizing hallucinations and ensuring accurate responses. In this 90-minute hands-on tutorial, we’ll explore building conversational AI systems using CALM and Rasa. CALM (Conversational AI Language Model) combines traditional conversational AI techniques with LLMs, separating conversational ability from business logic execution to deliver reliable, cost efficient, and scalable solutions. Unlike LLMs that handle both sides of the conversation, CALM focuses on user understanding with predefined business logic. This approach not only accelerates development but also enhances cost efficiency, scalability and reliability. By focusing on predefined business logic with CALM, you’ll gain the ability to build sophisticated, scalable systems faster. You’ll also learn how to use fine-tuned, open-weight models, such as llama 8b to power your AI assistant.

Participants will learn how to use CALM for business logic and Rasa for dialogue management, with practical insights, code examples, and best practices. Materials will be provided via a GitHub repository with a GitHub Codespace for easy access and execution.

PyData is an educational program of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in the United States. PyData provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other. The global PyData network promotes discussion of best practices, new approaches, and emerging technologies for data management, processing, analytics, and visualization. PyData communities approach data science using many languages, including (but not limited to) Python, Julia, and R.

PyData conferences aim to be accessible and community-driven, with novice to advanced level presentations. PyData tutorials and talks bring attendees the latest project features along with cutting-edge use cases.

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