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shinychat provides a Shiny toolkit for building generative AI applications like chatbots and streaming content. It’s designed to work alongside the ellmer package, which handles response generation.

Installation

You can install shinychat from CRAN with:

install.packages("shinychat")

Or, install the development version of shinychat from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("posit-dev/shinychat/pkg-r")

Example

To run this example, you’ll first need to create an OpenAI API key, and set it in your environment as OPENAI_API_KEY.

You’ll also need to install the ellmer package (with install.packages("ellmer")).

library(shiny)
library(shinychat)

ui <- page_chat(
  "Assistant",
  id = "chat",
  greeting = "**Hello!** How can I help you today?"
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  chat <-
    ellmer::chat_openai(
      system_prompt = "Respond to the user as succinctly as possible."
    )

  observeEvent(input$chat_user_input, {
    stream <- chat$stream_async(input$chat_user_input)
    chat_append("chat", stream)
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Screenshot of the resulting app.

Next steps

Ready to start building a chatbot with shinychat? See Get Started to learn more.

Use page_chat() when the chat owns the full browser window. It includes responsive navigation and sidebar support:

ui <- page_chat(
  "Assistant",
  toolbar = actionButton("clear_chat", "Clear conversation"),
  toolbar_global = bslib::toolbar(
    bslib::input_dark_mode(),
    actionButton("help", "Help")
  ),
  sidebar = chat_sidebar(tags$p("Tools"), history = FALSE),
  pages_navbar = list(
    chat_nav_panel(
      "About",
      tags$p("About this app."),
      value = "about",
    ),
    chat_nav_panel(
      "Settings",
      tags$p("Settings"),
      toolbar = actionButton("save_settings", "Save settings")
    )
  ),
  drawer = chat_drawer(tags$p("Preview content"), title = "Preview")
)

For an embedded chat or a layout with other top-level content, continue using chat_ui() inside bslib::page_fillable(), bslib::page_sidebar(), or another suitable container. page_chat() owns its page composition and should not be wrapped in another page container.

The package includes credential-free page_chat() examples. Run them with:

shiny::runExample("page-chat-navigation", package = "shinychat")
shiny::runExample("page-chat-drawer-controls", package = "shinychat")