Append for useAssistant

[AlexIsMaking]

Feature Description

I've just switched to useAssistant and the function that I'm missing the most is the append function that's available for useChat.

My hacky workaround is to set the input using setInput and then trigger submitMessage once the input has been set. This doesn't look great to the user.

Use Case

I'm displaying buttons in my UI which will insert prompts, to start new conversations. I need to send the prompt to OpenAI when it's submitted.

[lgrammel]

#1407

[lgrammel]

Available in v3.0.25

[AlexIsMaking]

@lgrammel really grateful for the quick implementation here. When I use append, the status helper variable isn't set to in_progress though, is that expected behaviour?

At the moment, I'm relying on that status changing to trigger storage of user & assistant messages, since useAssistant doesn't have useChat's onFinish callback option.

[lgrammel]

@AlexIsMaking thanks for letting me know. it seems i dropped it by accident during the change

[lgrammel]

#1423

[brian-yates]

Hello - I have a question and possible bug regarding the append function in the useAssistant hook. It seems that calling append will add a message to the messages property (e.g. setMessages(prev => [...prev, newMessage])), but it calls the API endpoint with whatever the current input value is, regardless of what you called append with.

I would expect that calling append would call the API with the respective appended message content.

For additional context, I am adding prompts to the chat form that a user can click which would automatically send a message with the prompt content, rather than having to manually type out the message...and it seems like append is the perfect method to do this...it just doesn't work like I would expect.

Is this a bug or is it expected behavior?

Edit: this seems to be fixed...just had to upgrade to ai version 3.1.0

[saintpepsicola]

Thanks. I just ran into the bug lol @brian-yates