Just to clarify, this is taking user input and matching the first letter to the 'action' number? e.g. I enter "h" and it's mapped to the "help" action (3)?

If so, you might want to structure a dictionary like this:

input_map = {"a": "1", "b": "2", "c": "3"}

and then access it by just querying the key:

response = "a"
input_map[response] # "1"

This does not handle the default action, however. You might want to pass that in directly to the function somehow?