Chat with an assistant
This page shows you how to chat with an assistant. There are two operations you can use to chat with an assistant:
-
chat_assistant
: This is the recommended way to chat with an assistant, as it offers more functionality and control over the assistant’s responses and references than thechat_completion_assistant
operation. For more information, see Chat with an assistant. -
chat_completion_assistant
: This operation is based on the OpenAI Chat Completion API, a commonly used and adopted API. It is useful if you need inline citations or OpenAI-compatible responses, but has limited functionality compared to thechat_assistant
operation. For more information, see Chat through an OpenAI-compatible interface.
You can chat with an assistant using the Pinecone console. Select the assistant to chat with, and use the Assistant playground.
Chat with an assistant
To chat with a Pinecone assistant, use the chat_assistant
endpoint. It returns either a JSON object or a text stream.
This is the recommended way to chat with an assistant, as it offers more functionality and control over the assistant’s responses and references. However, if you need your assistant to be OpenAI-compatible or need inline citations, use the chat_completion_assistant
endpoint.
Request a JSON response
The following example requests a JSON response to the message, “What is the inciting incident in Pride and Prejudice?”:
The content
parameter in the request cannot be empty.
The example above returns a result like the following:
Request a streaming response
The following example requests a JSON response to the message, “What is the inciting incident in Pride and Prejudice?”:
The content
parameter in the request cannot be empty.
The example above returns a result like the following:
There are four types of chunks in a streaming chat response:
- Starting chunk: Includes
"role":"assistant"
, which indicates that the assistant is responding to the user’s message. - Content chunk: Includes a value in the
content
field (e.g.,"content":"The"
), which is part of the assistant’s streamed response to the user’s message. - Citation chunk: Includes a citation to the document that the assistant used to generate the response.
- Ending chunk: Includes
"finish_reason":"stop"
, which indicates that the assistant has finished responding to the user’s message.
Chat through an OpenAI-compatible interface
The chat_completion_assistant
endpoint is based on the OpenAI Chat Completion API, a commonly used and adopted API. It is useful if you need inline citations or OpenAI-compatible responses, but has limited functionality compared to the chat_assistant
endpoint. It returns either a JSON object or a text stream.
If you do not need your assistant to be OpenAI-compatible or need inline citations, use the chat_assistant
endpoint.
Request a JSON response
The following example requests a JSON response to the message, “What is the maximum height of a red pine?”:
The content
parameter in the request cannot be empty.
The example above returns a result like the following:
Request a streaming response
The following example requests a text streaming response to the message, “What is the maximum height of a red pine?”:
The content
parameter in the request cannot be empty.
The example above returns a result like the following:
There are three types of chunks in a chat completion response:
- Starting chunk: Includes
"role":"assistant"
, which indicates that the assistant is responding to the user’s message. - Content chunk: Includes a value in the
content
field (e.g.,"content":"The"
), which is part of the assistant’s streamed response to the user’s message. - Ending chunk: Includes
"finish_reason":"stop"
, which indicates that the assistant has finished responding to the user’s message.
Provide conversation history in a chat request
Models lack memory of previous requests, so any relevant messages from earlier in the conversation must be present in the messages
object.
In the following example, the messages
object includes prior messages that are necessary for interpreting the newest message.
The above example request returns a response like the following:
Filter chat with metadata
You can filter which documents to use for chat completions. The following example filters the responses to use only documents that include the metadata "resource": "encyclopedia"
.
For more information about filtering with metadata, see Filter with metadata.
Choose a model for your assistant
Pinecone Assistant uses the gpt-4o
model by default. Alternatively, you can use the claude-3-5-sonnet
model. Select the LLM to use by setting the model
parameter in the request:
Extract the response content
Both the chat_assistant
and chat_completion_assistant
operations return a JSON response object containing the assistant’s chat response along with other information. The message string is contained in the following JSON object:
choices.[0].message.content
for a JSON chat responsechoices[0].delta.content
for a streaming chat response
You can extract the message content and print it to the console:
This creates output like the following:
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