Perplexity Chat

Perplexity AI provides a unique AI service that integrates its language models with real-time search capabilities. It offers a variety of models and supports streaming responses for conversational AI.

Spring AI integrates with Perplexity AI by reusing the existing OpenAI client. To get started, you’ll need to obtain a Perplexity API Key, configure the base URL, and select one of the supported models.

spring ai perplexity integration
The Perplexity API is not fully compatible with the OpenAI API. Perplexity combines realtime web search results with its language model responses. Unlike OpenAI, Perplexity does not expose toolCalls - function call mechanisms. Additionally, currently Perplexity doesn’t support multimodal messages.

Check the PerplexityWithOpenAiChatModelIT.java tests for examples of using Perplexity with Spring AI.

Prerequisites

  • Create an API Key: Visit here to create an API Key. Configure it using the spring.ai.openai.api-key property in your Spring AI project.

  • Set the Perplexity Base URL: Set the spring.ai.openai.base-url property to api.perplexity.ai.

  • Select a Perplexity Model: Use the spring.ai.openai.chat.model=<model name> property to specify the model. Refer to Supported Models for available options.

  • Set the chat completions path: Set the spring.ai.openai.chat.completions-path to /chat/completions . Refer to chat completions api for more details.

Example environment variables configuration:

export SPRING_AI_OPENAI_API_KEY=<INSERT PERPLEXITY API KEY HERE>
export SPRING_AI_OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://api.perplexity.ai
export SPRING_AI_OPENAI_CHAT_MODEL=llama-3.1-sonar-small-128k-online

Add Repositories and BOM

Spring AI artifacts are published in Spring Milestone and Snapshot repositories. Refer to the Repositories section to add these repositories to your build system.

To help with dependency management, Spring AI provides a BOM (bill of materials) to ensure that a consistent version of Spring AI is used throughout the entire project. Refer to the Dependency Management section to add the Spring AI BOM to your build system.

Auto-configuration

Spring AI provides Spring Boot auto-configuration for the OpenAI Chat Client. To enable it add the following dependency to your project’s Maven pom.xml or Gradle build.gradle build files:

  • Maven

  • Gradle

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.ai</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-ai-openai-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
dependencies {
    implementation 'org.springframework.ai:spring-ai-openai-spring-boot-starter'
}
Refer to the Dependency Management section to add the Spring AI BOM to your build file.

Chat Properties

Retry Properties

The prefix spring.ai.retry is used as the property prefix that lets you configure the retry mechanism for the OpenAI chat model.

Property Description Default

spring.ai.retry.max-attempts

Maximum number of retry attempts.

10

spring.ai.retry.backoff.initial-interval

Initial sleep duration for the exponential backoff policy.

2 sec.

spring.ai.retry.backoff.multiplier

Backoff interval multiplier.

5

spring.ai.retry.backoff.max-interval

Maximum backoff duration.

3 min.

spring.ai.retry.on-client-errors

If false, throw a NonTransientAiException, and do not attempt retry for 4xx client error codes

false

spring.ai.retry.exclude-on-http-codes

List of HTTP status codes that should not trigger a retry (e.g. to throw NonTransientAiException).

empty

spring.ai.retry.on-http-codes

List of HTTP status codes that should trigger a retry (e.g. to throw TransientAiException).

empty

Connection Properties

The prefix spring.ai.openai is used as the property prefix that lets you connect to OpenAI.

Property Description Default

spring.ai.openai.base-url

The URL to connect to. Must be set to api.perplexity.ai

-

spring.ai.openai.chat.api-key

Your Perplexity API Key

-

Configuration Properties

The prefix spring.ai.openai.chat is the property prefix that lets you configure the chat model implementation for OpenAI.

Property Description Default

spring.ai.openai.chat.model

One of the supported Perplexity models. Example: llama-3.1-sonar-small-128k-online.

-

spring.ai.openai.chat.base-url

Optional overrides the spring.ai.openai.base-url to provide chat specific url. Must be set to api.perplexity.ai

-

spring.ai.openai.chat.completions-path

Must be set to /chat/completions

/v1/chat/completions

spring.ai.openai.chat.options.temperature

The amount of randomness in the response, valued between 0 inclusive and 2 exclusive. Higher values are more random, and lower values are more deterministic. Required range: 0 < x < 2.

0.2

spring.ai.openai.chat.options.frequencyPenalty

A multiplicative penalty greater than 0. Values greater than 1.0 penalize new tokens based on their existing frequency in the text so far, decreasing the model’s likelihood to repeat the same line verbatim. A value of 1.0 means no penalty. Incompatible with presence_penalty. Required range: x > 0.

1

spring.ai.openai.chat.options.maxTokens

The maximum number of completion tokens returned by the API. The total number of tokens requested in max_tokens plus the number of prompt tokens sent in messages must not exceed the context window token limit of model requested. If left unspecified, then the model will generate tokens until either it reaches its stop token or the end of its context window.

-

spring.ai.openai.chat.options.presencePenalty

A value between -2.0 and 2.0. Positive values penalize new tokens based on whether they appear in the text so far, increasing the model’s likelihood to talk about new topics. Incompatible with frequency_penalty. Required range: -2 < x < 2

0

spring.ai.openai.chat.options.topP

The nucleus sampling threshold, valued between 0 and 1 inclusive. For each subsequent token, the model considers the results of the tokens with top_p probability mass. We recommend either altering top_k or top_p, but not both. Required range: 0 < x < 1

0.9

spring.ai.openai.chat.options.stream-usage

(For streaming only) Set to add an additional chunk with token usage statistics for the entire request. The choices field for this chunk is an empty array and all other chunks will also include a usage field, but with a null value.

false
All properties prefixed with spring.ai.openai.chat.options can be overridden at runtime by adding a request specific Runtime Options to the Prompt call.

Runtime Options

The OpenAiChatOptions.java provides model configurations, such as the model to use, the temperature, the frequency penalty, etc.

On start-up, the default options can be configured with the OpenAiChatModel(api, options) constructor or the spring.ai.openai.chat.options.* properties.

At run-time you can override the default options by adding new, request specific, options to the Prompt call. For example to override the default model and temperature for a specific request:

ChatResponse response = chatModel.call(
    new Prompt(
        "Generate the names of 5 famous pirates.",
        OpenAiChatOptions.builder()
            .withModel("llama-3.1-sonar-large-128k-online")
            .withTemperature(0.4)
        .build()
    ));
In addition to the model specific OpenAiChatOptions you can use a portable ChatOptions instance, created with the ChatOptionsBuilder#builder().

Function Calling

Perplexity does not support explicit function calling. Instead, it integrates search results directly into responses.

Multimodal

Currently, the Perplexity API doesn’t support media content.

Sample Controller

Create a new Spring Boot project and add the spring-ai-openai-spring-boot-starter to your pom (or gradle) dependencies.

Add a application.properties file, under the src/main/resources directory, to enable and configure the OpenAi chat model:

spring.ai.openai.api-key=<PERPLEXITY_API_KEY>
spring.ai.openai.base-url=https://api.perplexity.ai
spring.ai.openai.chat.completions-path=/chat/completions
spring.ai.openai.chat.options.model=llama-3.1-sonar-small-128k-online
spring.ai.openai.chat.options.temperature=0.7

# The Perplexity API doesn't support embeddings, so we need to disable it.
spring.ai.openai.embedding.enabled=false
replace the api-key with your Perplexity Api key.

This will create a OpenAiChatModel implementation that you can inject into your class. Here is an example of a simple @Controller class that uses the chat model for text generations.

@RestController
public class ChatController {

    private final OpenAiChatModel chatModel;

    @Autowired
    public ChatController(OpenAiChatModel chatModel) {
        this.chatModel = chatModel;
    }

    @GetMapping("/ai/generate")
    public Map generate(@RequestParam(value = "message", defaultValue = "Tell me a joke") String message) {
        return Map.of("generation", this.chatModel.call(message));
    }

    @GetMapping("/ai/generateStream")
	public Flux<ChatResponse> generateStream(@RequestParam(value = "message", defaultValue = "Tell me a joke") String message) {
        Prompt prompt = new Prompt(new UserMessage(message));
        return this.chatModel.stream(prompt);
    }
}

Supported Models

Perplexity supports several models optimized for search-enhanced conversational AI. Refer to Supported Models for details.

References