Assistants API improvements feedback after a few weeks using it

API Feedback
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Hi there! We’re embedding a custom GPT in our app and started using the Assistant API for that purpose. For a first release, it’s pretty powerful and works great. We wanted to share our initial feedback after a few weeks hacking on it:

  1. Please update the docs with a lot more code examples. Some parts like “Function calling” are not obvious at first sight. It took us some digging to really understand how to call external API with it. You’d expect to be able to give an endpoint somewhere but it doesn’t work like this. We figured it out in the end but I feel like the documentation could be largely improved to better describe how Function calling works with a concrete example of how to call an external API with it. Looking at the forum, we are not the only ones who were puzzled at first sight :slight_smile:

  2. Output streaming support is an absolute must. Without it, the UX is subpar and clearly inferior to what users expect. I have no doubt you guys will ship that soon but… it still wanted to mention it.

  3. Incomplete third-party library support (as of today, at least). it seems that Assistant API is only partially supported by langchain and llamaindex. The lazy devs that we are were hoping to use a wrapper to simplify our life but, from what we saw, using Function Calling via Assistants API is not yet supported by those wrappers (Let me know if we’re mistaken here :pray: ).

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Hey, thanks for the post / feedback and welcome to the community!

Hope you stick around. We’ve got a great community garden growing here, and sounds like you’d fit right in. If you can make it to Trust Level 3 here, there’s a bunch of perks you get.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback / observations!

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Hi @thibauld, welcome!

I resonate with each point in your post.

Regarding point #3 Incomplete third-party library support, have you heard of or considered using Marvin ?

Notably, I think their Assistants and Applications toolkits are worth checking out. They’re both wrappers around OpenAI’s Assistants API with the objective of improving the dev experience.

Note, I don’t have extensive experience using either of these toolkits beyond copy pasting the examples from their docs.

Cheers!

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Thanks @jacob3, I’ll check them out!

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A post was split to a new topic: Hi T. Im new building GPTs and need help

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Our team built out assistants API but had to transition back to chat completions because the lack of streaming was a make-or-break for user experience.

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