Engineers use phidata to build agents with memory, knowledge, tools and reasoning.

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Example: Research Agent

Let’s create a research agent that can search the web, read the top links and write a report for us. We “prompt” the agent using description and instructions.

1

Create Research Agent

Create a file research_agent.py

research_agent.py
from phi.agent import Agent
from phi.model.openai import OpenAIChat
from phi.tools.duckduckgo import DuckDuckGo
from phi.tools.newspaper4k import Newspaper4k

agent = Agent(
    model=OpenAIChat(id="gpt-4o"),
    tools=[DuckDuckGo(), Newspaper4k()],
    description="You are a senior NYT researcher writing an article on a topic.",
    instructions=[
        "For a given topic, search for the top 5 links.",
        "Then read each URL and extract the article text, if a URL isn't available, ignore it.",
        "Analyse and prepare an NYT worthy article based on the information.",
    ],
    markdown=True,
    show_tool_calls=True,
    add_datetime_to_instructions=True,
    # debug_mode=True,
)
agent.print_response("Simulation theory", stream=True)
2

Run the agent

Install libraries

pip install phidata openai duckduckgo-search newspaper4k lxml_html_clean

Run the agent

python research_agent.py

The description and instructions are converted to the system prompt and the input (e.g. Simulation theory) is passed as the user prompt.

Use debug_mode=True to view the raw logs behind the scenes.

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Capturing the Agent’s response in a variable

While Agent.print_response() is useful for quick experiments, we typically want to capture the agent’s response in a variable to either pass to the frontend, another agent or use in our application. The Agent.run() function returns the response as a RunResponse object.

from phi.agent import Agent, RunResponse
from phi.utils.pprint import pprint_run_response

agent = Agent(...)

# Run agent and return the response as a variable
response: RunResponse = agent.run("Simulation theory")
# Print the response in markdown format
pprint_run_response(response, markdown=True)

By default stream=False, set stream=True to return a stream of RunResponse objects.

from typing import Iterator

# Run agent and return the response as a stream
response_stream: Iterator[RunResponse] = agent.run("Simulation theory", stream=True)
# Print the response stream in markdown format
pprint_run_response(response_stream, markdown=True, show_time=True)

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RunResponse

The Agent.run() function returns either a RunResponse object or an Iterator[RunResponse] when stream=True.

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RunResponse Attributes

AttributeTypeDefaultDescription
contentAnyNoneContent of the response.
content_typestr"str"Specifies the data type of the content.
contextList[MessageContext]NoneThe context added to the response for RAG.
eventstrRunEvent.run_response.valueEvent type of the response.
event_dataDict[str, Any]NoneData associated with the event.
messagesList[Message]NoneA list of messages included in the response.
metricsDict[str, Any]NoneUsage metrics of the run.
modelstrNoneThe model used in the run.
run_idstrNoneRun Id.
agent_idstrNoneAgent Id for the run.
session_idstrNoneSession Id for the run.
toolsList[Dict[str, Any]]NoneList of tools provided to the model.
created_atint-Unix timestamp of the response creation.

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