Hey! We have just released an update to HuggingChat Assistants that allows you to connect them to the Internet to get more relevant and interactive answers. When you create or edit an Assistant, you will now see an option for Internet access. It can have four settings: enabled, domain search, specific links, and disabled.

• Enabled is the same websearch we currently use in HuggingChat. Use it for generic assistants that can have conversations about many domains.
• Domains search allows you to specify a domain name or even part of a website that the web search will crawl to try to find relevant information. Useful if you want to have an Assistant that can find search and use content from your website or a particular news outlet you like, for example.
• Specific Links lets you specify a direct URL to a web page or plain text document that you want to pass to the Assistant. This is very useful for talking to your text documents, adding extra context to your role-playing game, or passing any arbitrary data from your web server to the Assistant.
• Dynamic links Allow the use of template variables {{url=https://example.com/path}} to insert dynamic content into your prompt by making GET requests to specified URLs on each inference.

Enabled

This is equivalent to enabling the web search toggle in HuggingChat. The model generates a query from your question, uses it to search the web, and parses the results to improve the answer. You can't restrict which domains or links are used in this mode.

Domains search

In this mode you can restrict the domains used in the web search. This is equivalent to appending site:example.com to the web query. For example if you want to make an assistant that only uses wikipedia as a source:

You can also be more specific, for example you could have an assistant that only knows about the docs for our library diffusers.

Specific Links

This allows you to directly specify up to 10 URLs that will be added directly to the context for better results. We support both HTML and plain text content such as markdown! For example, if you want your assistant to know about the chat-ui repository README file, you can add a link to the markdown file:

Or if you want an assistant that knows about the current top news headlines:

This is a very flexible setting because you have complete control over what is passed to the context. For example, you could create your own web server in a space that returns a different country name every day and use it to make a country guessing game where every user gets the same new country every day. Also note that for long web pages it will limit the maximum context it can use, so less may perform better.

Safety & Trust

Because web-connected assistants use an external source of information, you should never trust any information without verifying it yourself, and you should always manually check which source they use; this information is publicly available on the Assistant Settings page. Web-connected assistants have a special icon so you can easily identify them.

Let us know what you think of the feature, and feel free to share your new assistants in this thread! 🤗

Allows users to custom search views

Could this, however, indicate that queries are sent to an external server or are privacy limitations set in place?