Get reports with Research Assistant

The Research Assistant is a Google-developed agent for users who need to gather, analyze, and understand internal and external information.

When you enter a prompt to the Research Assistant, such as "Compare Example Project competitors", the Research Assistant assesses whether the question is research related, generates a plan outlining the steps it will take to do the research, and streams questions and answers as it progresses in its research. It then generates a report of its findings with citations as well as an audio summary.

For research sources, the Research Assistant uses data that's indexed in the app. It can also use web results if web search is enabled for the app.

Here are some example prompts that the Research Assistant could generate reports for:

How can we improve the user experience of our existing mobile banking app to make it more intuitive and user-friendly?
How can we reduce customer wait times during peak hours without compromising on the quality of support?
Analyze the economic situation of Central European countries.
Compare BigQuery with its competitors, and provide the results in table format.

Use the Research Assistant

Your end users can access and use the Research Assistant through the app. The Research Assistant has access to data that the app has already indexed and, if enabled, web results. For how to enable web results, see Configure Google Search grounding.

You can get results from the Research Assistant from the app or using the API.

App

To use the Research Assistant in the app, do the following:

In the app navigation menu, go to Research Assistant.
Enter a prompt to the Research Assistant. If the prompt isn't research-related, the Research Assistant generates an answer. If the prompt is determined to be research-related, then the Research Assistant does the following:
- Outlines the topics that it plans to research
- Streams the topics that it's researching as it progresses
- Generates a report of findings with citations
- Creates a 1-2 minute audio summary of the report

REST

To use the Research Assistant using the API, do the following:

Send a request to the streamAssist method with answerGenerationMode set to research.

 curl -X POST \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
 -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -H "X-Goog-User-Project: PROJECT_ID" \
 "https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1alpha/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/engines/APP_ID/assistants/ASSISTANT_ID:streamAssist" \
   -d '{
         "query": {
           "text": "QUERY"
           },
         "answerGenerationMode": "research"
       }'

Replace the following:

PROJECT_ID: the ID of your Google Cloud project.
APP_ID: the ID of the app.
ASSISTANT_ID: the ID of the assistant. If you created the assistant in the Google Cloud console, then the ID is default_assistant.
QUERY: the query.

Example command:

curl -X POST \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
 -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -H "X-Goog-User-Project: 1234" \
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1alpha/projects/1234/locations/global/collections/default_collection/engines/myapp/assistants/default_assistant:assist" \
 -d '{
       "query": {
         "text": "how do i use bigquery"
         },
       "answerGenerationMode": "research"
     }'