Assistant Citations/Annotations array is always empty

API
20

There are many different reports of this happening.

From our experience:

  • Assistants are more reliable with annotations when these come from assistant-linked files rather than thread (message) files.
  • Asking for annotations, sources seems to improve likelyhood of them being included.
  • Nonetheless it seems to very very often include references without the related sources. (I rarely see more than 2 correct annotations)
  • The ‘text’ inside annotations is supposed to contain the source text to replace but often contains other, unrelated text. Thus, the snippet suggested by OpenAI in their documentation tents to break the answer in unexpected ways (as you’d be replacing random texts with references)

We would appreciate any additional information the OpenAI team can provide on how to make annotations work consistenly or at lease more reliably.

Thanks

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