Set Colang variables from Python about nemo-guardrails

[drazvan]

Hi @jamescalam!

It depends on how you're using NeMo Guardrails. If you're using directly the generate/generate_asyc methods, you can send an additional message at the beginning of the conversation (or anywhere inside) with the role set to context. See the example here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo-Guardrails/blob/main/docs/user_guide/python-api.md#message-generation

new_message = app.generate(messages=[{
    "role": "context",
    "content": {
        "some_var": "some_value"
    }
},
{
    "role": "user",
    "content": "Hello! What can you do for me?"
}])

We can add support for register_context_var similar to register_action. If you have a bit of time to contribute, I can point you in the right direction. What is your use case for this?

[jamescalam]

Okay, I wasn't aware that we could use the context role like this, that is very helpful. The use case would be where we want to include details like $name, $company_name, etc.

I'm still trying to familiarize myself with the library and Colang so I'm not sure if this is a valid use case too, but in the case that I'd like the flows to vary based on whether certain requirements have been satisfied, it would be helpful to do that with a register_context_var method. For example, my Colang file could look like:

define flow
    # after X criteria has been satisfied, like the conversation has continued for more than 2 minutes
    user ask question
    if $long_conversation
        bot express tiredness
    else
        bot answer question

And in Python we'd have a check for time spent since the conversation began, and once that exceeds 2 minutes we would do something like rails.register_context_var("long_conversation", True)

Happy to contribute if it seems relevant