MixedChat_Agents - recreating conversation

[JP-droidic]

Hi Team,

looking at https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel/blob/main/dotnet/samples/Concepts/Agents/MixedChat_Agents.cs
and wondering how you re-create conversation.

In a classic web scenario, when a user asks something, we post the question to the server, return the answer to the user, and the user asks again - we need to recreate AgentGroupChat on each post.

How should we store the chat conversation between server runs and re-create history?

If one of the agents is an OpenAI assistant, is every (post to the server) run on a different OPENAI thread? Does the SK create a new thread and somehow fills the assistant's part of the chat history?

[crickman]

We are currently working on a feature to serialize and deserialize AgentChat (which AgentGroupChat will fully support). If your scenario is bound to a mixed agent scenario, then this feature is likely required. We hope to have this available within the next few weeks.

If you are using one agent type (only ChatCompletionAgent or OpenAIAssistantAgent), then you could preserve either the ChatHistory or ThreadId in storage for retreival. If your service has the concept of a user-session, then you'd retrieve the appropriate state according to that session-key (which is likely component of the URI in your REST API).

Note: For the ChatHistory case, I might store each message as separate document. We have a legacy project that managed chat history in this fashion: https://github.com/microsoft/chat-copilot

When AgentChat serialization feature is ready, I suspect you'd retrieve this chat payload using the same approach (by some session-key). The good news is that since an single agent is able to participate in multiple AgentChat instances, you can include your agents in the DI pattern for injection into the AgentChat you'll be re-creating from the serialized payload (along with any new AgentChat instance).

If you must absolutely become unblocked immediately, you might consider retrieving the AgentChat history for storage via GetChatMessagesAsync and then restoring them with AddChatMessage...againt, using whatever session-key you've defined. For assistant, this will create a new threadid, but it will have the history present.

[JP-droidic]

Thank you @crickman, looking forward to the serialization feature