---
id: facebook-wit-ai-to-rasa
sidebar_label: "Rasa as open source alternative to Facebook\u2019s Wit.ai - Migration\
  \ Guide"
title: "Rasa as open source alternative to Facebook\u2019s Wit.ai - Migration Guide"
description: Open source alternative to Facebook's Wit.ai for conversational bots and NLP
---

To get started with migrating your application from Wit.ai to Rasa:

## Step 1: Export your Training Data from Wit.ai

Navigate to your app's setting page by clicking the **Settings** item
in the **Management** section of the left navigation bar.
Scroll down to **Export your data** and hit the button **Download .zip with your data**.

This will download a file with a `.zip` extension. Unzip this file to create a folder.
The files you want from your download are located in the **utterances** directory.

## Step 2: Create a Rasa Project

To create a Rasa project, run:

```bash
rasa init
```

This will create a directory called `data`.
Remove the files in this directory, and move the content of the `utterances` directory
to `data`.

```bash
rm -rf data/
mv /path/to/utterances data/
```

## Step 3: Train your NLU model

To train a model using your Wit data, run:

```bash
rasa train nlu
```

## Step 4: Test your NLU model

Let's see how your NLU model will interpret some test messages.
To start a testing session, run:

```bash
rasa shell nlu
```

This will prompt your for input.
Type a test message and press 'Enter'.
The output of your NLU model will be printed to the screen.
You can keep entering messages and test as many as you like.
Press 'control + C' to quit.

## Step 5: Start a Server with your NLU Model

To start a server with your NLU model, run:

```bash
rasa run nlu
```

This will start a server listening on port 5005.

To send a request to the server, run:

```bash
curl 'localhost:5005/model/parse?emulation_mode=wit' -d '{"text": "hello"}'
The `emulation_mode` parameter tells Rasa that you want your json
response to have the same format as you would get from wit.ai.
You can also leave it out to get the result in the usual Rasa format.

Join the [Rasa Community Forum](https://forum.rasa.com/) and let us know how your migration went!
