This guide shows you how to set up and use Pinecone Assistant, a service that allows you to upload documents, ask questions, and receive responses that reference your documents.

To get started in your browser, use the Assistant Quickstart colab notebook.

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1. Install an SDK

The Pinecone Python SDK and Node.js SDK provide convenient programmatic access to the Assistant API.

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2. Get an API key

You need an API key to make calls to your assistant.

Create a new API key in the Pinecone console, or use the widget below to generate a key. If you don’t have a Pinecone account, the widget will sign you up for the free Starter plan.

Your generated API key:

"{{YOUR_API_KEY}}"

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3. Create an assistant

Create an assistant, as in the following example:

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4. Upload a file to the assistant

With Pinecone Assistant, you can upload documents, ask questions, and receive responses that reference your documents. This is known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

For this quickstart, download a sample 10-k filing file to your local device.

Next, upload the file to your assistant:

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5. Chat with the assistant

With the sample file uploaded, you can now chat with the assistant. Ask the assistant questions about your document. It returns either a JSON object or a text stream.

The following example requests a default response to the message, “Who is the CFO of Netflix?”:

The example above returns a response like the following:

{
    'id': '0000000000000000163008a05b317b7b', 
    'model': 'gpt-4o-2024-05-13', 
    'usage': {
        'prompt_tokens': 9259, 
        'completion_tokens': 30, 
        'total_tokens': 9289
        }, 
        'message': {
            'content': 'The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Netflix is Spencer Neumann.', 
            'role': '"assistant"'
            }, 
            'finish_reason': 'stop', 
            'citations': [
                {
                    'position': 63, 
                    'references': [
                        {
                            'pages': [78, 72, 79], 
                            'file': {
                                'name': 'Netflix-10-K-01262024.pdf', 
                                'id': '76a11dd1...', 
                                'metadata': {
                                    'company': 'netflix', 
                                    'document_type': 'form 10k'
                                    }, 
                                    'created_on': '2024-12-06T01:29:07.369208590Z', 
                                    'updated_on': '2024-12-06T01:29:50.923493799Z', 
                                    'status': 'Available', 
                                    'percent_done': 1.0, 
                                    'signed_url': 'https://storage.googleapis.com/...', 
                                    "error_message": null, 
                                    'size': 1073470.0
                                }
                            }
                        ]
                    }
                ]
            }

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6. Clean up

When you no longer need the example-assistant, delete the assistant:

Deleting an assistant also deletes all files uploaded to the assistant.

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Next steps

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