Does assistants API support streamig response? If not, any way of similar performance
#Streaming Assistant
night nacelle
austere relicBOT
Hi @night nacelle. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:
Yes, the OpenAI API does support streaming responses. This feature allows you to start receiving and processing the beginning of the completion before the full completion is finished, which can be particularly useful when generating long completions that could otherwise take many seconds to receive.
To use streaming with the chat completions or completions endpoints, you need to set stream=True when making the API call. The response will be an object that streams back the response as data-only server-sent events. You should extract chunks from the delta field rather than the message field.
Here's an example of how to set up streaming in Python:
# imports
import time # for measuring time duration of API calls
from openai import OpenAI
import os
client = OpenAI(api_key=os.environ.get("OPENAI_API_KEY", "<your OpenAI API key if not set as env var>"))
However, there are a couple of downsides to be aware of. Using stream=True in a production application can make it more difficult to moderate the content of the completions, as partial completions may be more difficult to evaluate. This may have implications for approved usage. Another drawback is that the response no longer includes the usage field to tell you how many tokens were consumed. You can calculate this yourself after receiving and combining all of the responses, using a tool like tiktoken.
As for the assistant API, it seems that streaming functionality for assistant messages is a feature request for the Python library, but it's not clear from the extracts whether this feature has been implemented yet[^1^].