Creating an Assistant

Welcome to the OpenAI Assistants API guide. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to build, configure, and test a custom AI assistant using both the Assistant Playground and the OpenAI API.

Overview of the Assistants API

The Assistants API (currently in beta) provides a simple way to register and interact with AI assistants. Before you begin, review the official Assistants API documentation and explore the Assistant Playground for a no-code experience.

Using the Assistant Playground

The Assistant Playground offers an interactive UI to:

• Configure models and tools
• Set system instructions
• Name your assistant
• Run quick tests

You can instantly see how requests and responses are structured, making it ideal for prototyping before coding.

Creating an Assistant with Python

To get started programmatically, install the OpenAI Python package and initialize the client:

pip install openai

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()

Next, register a new assistant:

assistant = client.beta.assistants.create(
    name="Math Tutor",
    instructions="You are a personal math tutor. Write and run Python code to solve math problems step by step.",
    tools={"type": "code_interpreter"},
    model="gpt-4"
)

Handling Streaming Responses

For real-time output, subclass AssistantEventHandler and override event methods:

from typing_extensions import override
from openai import AssistantEventHandler

class EventHandler(AssistantEventHandler):
    @override
    def on_text_created(self, text) -> None:
        print(text, end="", flush=True)

    @override
    def on_text_del(self, delta, snapshot):
        print(delta.value, end="", flush=True)

    @override
    def on_tool_call_created(self, tool_call):
        print(f"Tool call: {tool_call.type}", flush=True)

    @override
    def on_tool_call_del(self, delta, snapshot):
        if delta.type == "code_interpreter":
            if delta.code_interpreter.input:
                print(delta.code_interpreter.input, end="", flush=True)
            if delta.code_interpreter.outputs:
                print("\n\noutput>", end=" ")
                for output in delta.code_interpreter.outputs:
                    if output.type == "logs":
                        print(f"\noutput.logs = {True}")

Testing Your Assistant

Let’s test the “Math Tutor” with a sample expression in the Playground or via API calls:

What is 13 times 5 divided by 6, times 5, plus 100 times 4 to the power of 2?

The assistant uses the code interpreter to compute and returns the result (approximately 1654.17).

Links and References

• Assistants API Guide
• Assistant Playground
• API Quickstart Guide
• Visual Studio Code