ftheriault/openai-simple-chat-assistant

Simple Chat bot and assistant tests using OpenAI

This is my first attempt to build a ChatBot using the OpenAI API.

Getting started

1. Install openai : pip install openai
2. Retrieve your OPENAI API key (https://platform.openai.com)
3. Create a .env file, and put your key in it, for example :

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-xxxx-ty234dsf6w2343twerfasdff

4. Run chat-completion.py

Documentation

AI types

There seems to be two types of APIs:

• Chat completion : Simpler to use
• Assistant API : More complex, requires configuration and more API calls. Better for long conversations and for adding proprietary knowledge/documents/data with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

Sources:

• https://medium.com/leniolabs/exploring-openais-apis-assistants-vs-chat-completions-91525f73422c
• https://platform.openai.com/docs/assistants/tools/knowledge-retrieval

Creating messages

Message roles

When creating a message in the conversation, it can have one of 3 roles :

• user : A message written by the user, which is sent to the assistant
• system : Context given to the ChatBot in order to customize it.
• assistant : Response from the ChatBot. By keeping messages, it allows a continuous conversation with history
• tool : I have not found information on this role, yet.

Examples of system messages

The following system messages completely changes how the assistant answers :

• "Translate the exact message written by the user in Spanish"
• "All answers must be exactly 15 words long"
• "You are an emotional assistant"