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Ask HN: Best Practices for LLM Chatbot that references user account details?

What's the current best practice for including personalized user account details (e.g. for queries like "How much did I spend on this credit card last month?") into a LLM chatbot?

Specifically, assuming the user has already been authenticated properly, how is the user details retrieved, how is the data re-formatted, and how is the data ultimately fed into the LLM? This is a function in many popular banking chatbots, e.g. Bank of America's Erica, but there is scarce information about the actual implementation.

( 3 comments | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Best Practices for LLM Chatbot that references us... by brianjking on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @11:30AM (#41058083)
This is often called Function calling or tool use where you provide the LLM the ability to execute API calls to external tools.
Re:Ask HN: Best Practices for LLM Chatbot that references us... by olives on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @09:51PM (#41064049)
Is function calling the only way to do this? If the user account has some associated text, for example, historical medical files, is there a way to pass that text in such that the user could query "Write a short summary about my medical history?"
Re:Ask HN: Best Practices for LLM Chatbot that references us... by fanweixiao on Thursday July 25, 2024 @06:02AM (#41066786)
You can create a function calling, the parameter is the user_id or a fingerprint of the user for backend. then, get all data from your database, returned as a JSON object, then, you will get the result.

The prompt will looks like:

""" you are a professional medical history recorder, write a short summary about the user's medical history, use tool_call when possible.

the current user_id is: abcd12345 """

your tool_call description should be set clearly, looks like:

""" get medical history by given user_id """