Build a GPT Agent With a Custom Knowledge Base and Email Functionality

Designing a Langchain agent with Pinecone Index and Zapier toolkit

Langchain agents have a huge potential for building custom conversational interfaces. With Langchain, you can use different types of data like URLs or PDFs to create a custom knowledge base. The agent can then use this knowledge base to answer questions and use other tools like a search engine or Zapier for other actions.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of building a Langchain agent that can answer questions based on a PDF document and can autonomously send emails using Zapier.

Setting Up

First, we need to install Langchain and other dependencies:

!pip install langchain
!pip install pypdf
!pip install pinecone-client
!pip install openai
!pip install tiktoken

We also need to set up API keys for OpenAI and Pinecone:

import os 
import pinecone

os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"] = "YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY"

# initialize pinecone
pinecone.init(
    api_key="YOUR_PINECONE_API_KEY",  # find at app.pinecone.io
    environment="YOUR_ENVIRONMENT_NAME"  # next to api key in console
)

Creating an Index

A langchain agent can use our custom knowledge base to get the required information. To do so, we need to let the large language model know about our context. One way to do this is to feed all the context information to the model along with the prompt. However, this method becomes impractical when dealing with a large amount of data. Instead, we can use indexes to store our knowledge base.

In an index, all data is split into small chunks, and each chunk has a semantic meaning stored in vectors. When the user makes a query, the system searches for relevant vectors and then finds the relevant chunks of information. Instead of feeding all the data in one query, we only take relevant chunks and provide them as context to the large language model.

Load data from PDF

Now, let’s load the documents for a custom knowledge base. We’ll use a PDF file as an example, but Langchain also supports other formats.