This tutorial builds on the Agent Builder Quickstart use case of summarizing research papers for a specific persona. It adds the ability to upload and parse PDFs with Agent Builder.

If you haven’t completed the Agent Builder Quickstart, you may want to do that first to familiarize yourself with the mechanics of Agent Builder.

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Build the UI

The UI for the agent contains:

  • A file input block
  • A dropdown to select the persona to summarize the file for
  • A button to start the summarization process
  • A message block to indicate that the file is in progress
  • A text block to display the results
1

Add a File Input block

First, add a File Input block to the canvas. In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Label: Research paper PDF
  • Allowed file types: .pdf
  • Allow multiple files: no

2

Add a dropdown to select the persona

Next, add a Dropdown input block to the canvas. In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Label: Persona
  • Options: add the personas you want to summarize the file for. This example uses the personas Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering.
  • State element: persona

3

Add a button to start the summarization process

Add a Button block to the canvas. In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Text: Summarize

4

Add a message block to indicate that the file is in progress

Add a Message block to the canvas, which will display a message to the user indicating that the summarization is in progress. In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Message: @{status}. This will display the status message from the agent’s state.

5

Add a text block to display the results

Finally, add a Text block to the canvas, which will display the summary results. In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Text: @{summary} (this will display the summary results from the agent’s state)
  • Use markdown: yes

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Build the blueprints

The agent has two blueprints:

The agent’s logic is segmented into two blueprints so that the file uploading can complete before the parsing and summarizing begins.

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First blueprint: Upload file to Writer cloud

1

Add a UI trigger for file input

Add a UI trigger block to the canvas. This triggers the blueprint when a user adds or changes the file in the file input block.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Alias: File upload. This is optional, but helps to identify the trigger in the blueprint.
  • Component Id: Select the File Input component from the dropdown of UI blocks
  • Event type: wf-file-change

2

Add a block to add files to Writer Cloud

Add a Add files to Writer Cloud block to the canvas. This block uploads the file to Writer Cloud.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Files: @{payload}. This references the payload provided by the preceding UI trigger. The payload contains the file that was uploaded to the file input block.

3

Add the uploaded file information to the state

Finally, add a Set state block to the canvas. This block takes the results from the Add files to Writer Cloud block and stores it in the state as the file_info state variable. This is the information about the uploaded file, specifically the id of the file in Writer Cloud, that will be used in the next blueprint.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • State element: file_info
  • Value type: text
  • Value: @{result}. This references the result from the previous block, which is the information about the uploaded file.

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Second blueprint: Parse and summarize the file

1

Add a new blueprint

First, add a new blueprint to the canvas. Navigate to the Blueprint Layers section in the sidebar and click + Add blueprint at the bottom of the blueprint layers outline.

2

Add a UI trigger for the button to start summarizing

Navigate back to the Add Block section of the Agent Builder and add a UI trigger block to the new blueprint. This triggers the blueprint when a user clicks the button to start summarizing.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Alias: Start summary (optional, to make the trigger easier to identify)
  • Component Id: Select the Summarize button component from the dropdown of UI blocks
  • Event type: wf-click

3

Update the status message

Add a Set state block to the canvas. This block updates the status message in the state to indicate that the summarization is in progress. The message will appear in the UI message block.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • State element: status
  • Value type: text
  • Value: %Summarizing.... The % symbol creates an animated spinning icon when the message appears in the UI.

4

Add a block to parse the uploaded PDF file

Add a Parse PDF Tool block to the canvas. This block parses the uploaded PDF file so that the agent can generate a summary of the file.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • File: @{file_info.0.id}. This references the file_info state variable you defined in the first blueprint and specifically access the id of the uploaded file.

The file_info state variable is an array of objects, containing one object with information from the Add files to Writer Cloud block. You can see the values of state variables by clicking the State Explorer (<>) icon at the top of the canvas. Learn more about nested state variables.

5

Add a block to generate a summary of the parsed file

Add a Text generation block to the canvas. This block generates text with a Palmyra LLM based on a prompt.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • Prompt: Provide a one-paragraph summary and a list of the three most important takeaways from this research paper: @{result}. Provide the summary for the user persona @{persona}.
    • @{result} references the result from the previous block, which is the parsed PDF file.
    • @{persona} references the persona state variable you defined in the UI.
  • Model: Palmyra X5

You can also update the additional fields Temperature and Max tokens to further control the output of the text generation.

6

Add the summary results to the state

Add a Set state block to the canvas. This block takes the results from the previous text generation block and stores it in the state as the summary state variable.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • State element: summary
  • Value type: text
  • Value: @{result}. This references the result from the previous block, which is the summary of the parsed PDF file.

7

Clear the status message from the state

Finally, add a Set state block to the canvas to clear the status message from the state.

In the block’s configuration panel, update the following fields:

  • State element: status
  • Value type: text
  • Value: Leave blank. This clears the status message from the state.

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Preview the agent

Now that you’ve built the agent, you can preview it.

  1. Navigate to the Preview tab in the Agent Builder.
  2. Add a PDF file to the file input block and select a persona from the dropdown.
  3. Click the Summarize button to start the summarization process.
  4. You should see the status message update to %Summarizing... and the summary results appear in the text block.

The results take a few seconds to generate. You can see the progress of the Agent Builder by going to the Blueprints tab. The blueprint blocks that have already run will be highlighted in green, and the one that’s currently running will have an animated blue border.

If you encounter any issues, refer to the Troubleshooting guide for debugging information.