Building AI Assistants with Vectara-agentic and Arize

The article discusses the integration of Arize Phoenix, an open-source observability tool, into vectara-agentic, a Python package for developing AI assistants and agents using Vectara. It introduces Agentic RAG, an enhanced version of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which allows systems to make decisions about retrieval strategies based on the context of tasks. The EV assistant application is used as an example to demonstrate how vectara-agentic can be utilized to build AI assistants and agents, and Arize Phoenix observability can provide insights into their operation. This integration enables developers to ensure that their agent behaves as intended in terms of inputs, outputs, tool choice, latency, and LLM use.