On this page
Haystack: agent building features and setup
An open-source framework for building AI applications and agents with information retrieval and processing components. It lets you assemble Pipelines and swap components as needed.
Tool by the Otomatzia editorial team · source content checked on
Overview
Haystack suits development teams that want control over the process of reading documents, retrieving information, and generating an answer with a model. Its modular components let you evaluate steps individually and integrate different model providers and search stores. It is useful infrastructure for knowledge assistants and document-based workflows. In addition to answer quality, check what happens when retrieval finds no information and how the system communicates the limits of its knowledge.
Features
- Modular Pipelines for retrieval, information processing, and agent execution.
- Connections to models and data stores from multiple providers.
- Tools to inspect and record workflow steps and deploy in different environments.
Business uses
- An internal knowledge assistant that searches organizational documents before generating an answer.
- Comparing retrieval methods on a test set of questions and answers.
Getting started
- Install the framework and build a Pipeline with small, familiar documents.
- Check the retrieval step separately before connecting the answer to the model.
- Define tests for questions without a suitable source and for documents with different access permissions.
What to check
- A major version change or a retrieval component change requires retesting the Pipeline and its results.
- An open-source deployment still requires infrastructure for storage, models, permissions, and monitoring.
Sources to check next
Vendor features and prices change. Confirm details on the linked official pages before you rely on them.