Building Custom Agents

You can create Fixie Agents entirely from the Fixie Web Console without any code, however, it is often useful to augment your Agent's abilities by customizing the code that the Agent is using internally. This page explains the entire process.

Agent Runtimes

An Agent is simply a program -- which can be implemented in any language -- that communicates with the Fixie cloud service using a simple protocol. The Agent can invoke various APIs provided by the Fixie platform to access documents, conversation state, and so forth.

When you create an Agent via the Fixie Web Console, it is created using the Default Agent Runtime that provides a set of standard Agent capabilities for holding conversations and consulting Document Collections.

You can build a Custom Agent using several approaches:

1. Create a Custom Agent Runtime, using AI.JSX. AI.JSX is designed to make it easy to build Fixie Agents and is the preferred approach.
2. Create a Custom Agent Runtime using another language or framework of your choice, using the Fixie Agent protocol to communicate with the Fixie platform.

In this document, we will focus on the first approach -- please contact us if you would like help with using a language or framework other than AI.JSX.

Building a Custom Agent using the Sidekick Template

It is easy to build a custom agent using the fixie-sidekick-template repository. For a complete guide to building a custom agent using this template, check out the Sidekick Quickstart Guide.