Build RAG Chatbot with LangChain, Faiss, Azure GPT-4o mini, and Nomic Nomic Embed

Introduction to RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a game-changer for GenAI applications, especially in conversational AI. It combines the power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT with external knowledge sources stored in vector databases such as Milvus and Zilliz Cloud, allowing for more accurate, contextually relevant, and up-to-date response generation. A RAG pipeline usually consists of four basic components: a vector database, an embedding model, an LLM, and a framework.

Key Components We'll Use for This RAG Chatbot

This tutorial shows you how to build a simple RAG chatbot in Python using the following components:

LangChain: An open-source framework that helps you orchestrate the interaction between LLMs, vector stores, embedding models, etc, making it easier to integrate a RAG pipeline.
Faiss: also known as Facebook AI Similarity Search, is an open-source vector search library that allows developers to quickly search for semantically similar multimedia data within a massive dataset of unstructured data. (If you want a much more scalable solution or hate to manage your own infrastructure, we recommend using Zilliz Cloud, which is a fully managed vector database service built on the open-source Milvus and offers a free tier supporting up to 1 million vectors.)
Azure GPT-4o Mini: A compact version of the powerful GPT-4 architecture, designed for efficient processing in resource-constrained environments. It delivers robust performance in natural language understanding and generation, making it suitable for chatbots, customer support, and content creation. Ideal for applications where speed and scalability are essential without compromising on quality.
Nomic Nomic Embed: Nomic Embed is an advanced AI model designed for generating high-dimensional embeddings that capture semantic relationships within textual data. Its strengths lie in providing robust text representation, enabling superior performance in natural language understanding tasks such as information retrieval, sentiment analysis, and recommendation systems. Ideal for applications in content personalization and knowledge discovery, Nomic Embed streamlines the process of deriving insights from large datasets.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a functional chatbot capable of answering questions based on a custom knowledge base.

Note: Since we may use proprietary models in our tutorials, make sure you have the required API key beforehand.

Step 1: Install and Set Up LangChain

%pip install --quiet --upgrade langchain-text-splitters langchain-community langgraph

Step 2: Install and Set Up Azure GPT-4o mini

pip install -qU "langchain[openai]"

import getpass
import os

if not os.environ.get("AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY"):
  os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY"] = getpass.getpass("Enter API key for Azure: ")

from langchain_openai import AzureChatOpenAI

llm = AzureChatOpenAI(
    azure_endpoint=os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT"],
    azure_deployment=os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT_NAME"],
    openai_api_version=os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_API_VERSION"],
)

Step 3: Install and Set Up Nomic Nomic Embed

pip install -qU langchain-nomic

import getpass
import os

if not os.environ.get("NOMIC_API_KEY"):
  os.environ["NOMIC_API_KEY"] = getpass.getpass("Enter API key for Nomic: ")

from langchain_nomic import NomicEmbeddings

embeddings = NomicEmbeddings(model="nomic-embed-text-v1")

Step 4: Install and Set Up Faiss

pip install -qU langchain-community

from langchain_community.vectorstores import FAISS

vector_store = FAISS(embedding_function=embeddings)

Step 5: Build a RAG Chatbot

Now that you’ve set up all components, let’s start to build a simple chatbot. We’ll use the Milvus introduction doc as a private knowledge base. You can replace it with your own dataset to customize your RAG chatbot.

import bs4
from langchain import hub
from langchain_community.document_loaders import WebBaseLoader
from langchain_core.documents import Document
from langchain_text_splitters import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter
from langgraph.graph import START, StateGraph
from typing_extensions import List, TypedDict

# Load and chunk contents of the blog
loader = WebBaseLoader(
    web_paths=("https://milvus.io/docs/overview.md",),
    bs_kwargs=dict(
        parse_only=bs4.SoupStrainer(
            class_=("doc-style doc-post-content")
        )
    ),
)

docs = loader.load()

text_splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter(chunk_size=1000, chunk_overlap=200)
all_splits = text_splitter.split_documents(docs)

# Index chunks
_ = vector_store.add_documents(documents=all_splits)

# Define prompt for question-answering
prompt = hub.pull("rlm/rag-prompt")


# Define state for application
class State(TypedDict):
    question: str
    context: List[Document]
    answer: str


# Define application steps
def retrieve(state: State):
    retrieved_docs = vector_store.similarity_search(state["question"])
    return {"context": retrieved_docs}


def generate(state: State):
    docs_content = "\n\n".join(doc.page_content for doc in state["context"])
    messages = prompt.invoke({"question": state["question"], "context": docs_content})
    response = llm.invoke(messages)
    return {"answer": response.content}


# Compile application and test
graph_builder = StateGraph(State).add_sequence([retrieve, generate])
graph_builder.add_edge(START, "retrieve")
graph = graph_builder.compile()

Test the Chatbot

Yeah! You've built your own chatbot. Let's ask the chatbot a question.

response = graph.invoke({"question": "What data types does Milvus support?"})
print(response["answer"])

Example Output

Milvus supports various data types including sparse vectors, binary vectors, JSON, and arrays. Additionally, it handles common numerical and character types, making it versatile for different data modeling needs. This allows users to manage unstructured or multi-modal data efficiently.

Optimization Tips

As you build your RAG system, optimization is key to ensuring peak performance and efficiency. While setting up the components is an essential first step, fine-tuning each one will help you create a solution that works even better and scales seamlessly. In this section, we’ll share some practical tips for optimizing all these components, giving you the edge to build smarter, faster, and more responsive RAG applications.

LangChain optimization tips

To optimize LangChain, focus on minimizing redundant operations in your workflow by structuring your chains and agents efficiently. Use caching to avoid repeated computations, speeding up your system, and experiment with modular design to ensure that components like models or databases can be easily swapped out. This will provide both flexibility and efficiency, allowing you to quickly scale your system without unnecessary delays or complications.

Faiss Optimization Tips

To enhance the performance of the Faiss library in a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, begin by selecting the appropriate index type based on your data volume and query speed requirements; for example, using an IVF (Inverted File) index can significantly speed up queries on large datasets by reducing the search space. Optimize your indexing process by using the nlist parameter to partition data into smaller clusters and set an appropriate number of probes (nprobe) during retrieval to balance between speed and accuracy. Ensure the vectors are properly normalized and consider using 16-bit or 8-bit quantization during indexing to reduce memory footprints for large datasets while maintaining reasonable retrieval accuracy. Additionally, consider leveraging GPU acceleration if available, as Faiss highly benefits from parallel processing, leading to faster nearest neighbor searches. Continuous fine-tuning and benchmarking with varying parameters and configurations can guide you in finding the most efficient setup specific to your data characteristics and retrieval requirements.

Azure GPT-4o mini optimization tips

Azure GPT-4o mini is a cost-efficient, low-latency model optimized for fast RAG applications. Improve retrieval by ensuring only the top-ranked, most relevant documents are included in the context to minimize unnecessary token consumption. Structure prompts with bullet points or numbered lists for clarity. Adjust temperature settings between 0.1 and 0.2 for precision, modifying top-p as needed for response diversity. To enhance performance, batch multiple API requests and implement caching for frequently queried information. Azure’s infrastructure allows for auto-scaling, so configure dynamic scaling to handle varying workloads efficiently. Stream responses for improved real-time performance, ensuring fast and interactive user experiences. If used in a pipeline, assign GPT-4o mini to preliminary filtering or summarization while reserving larger models for complex tasks.

Nomic Nomic Embed optimization tips

To optimize the Nomic Nomic Embed component in a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) setup, focus on fine-tuning your embedding model with domain-specific data to enhance contextual relevance. Implement efficient indexing strategies, such as using FAISS or Annoy, to speed up retrieval times without compromising accuracy. Experiment with dimensionality reduction techniques, like PCA or t-SNE, to decrease computational load while retaining essential semantic information. Regularly clean and preprocess your corpus to eliminate noise and improve embedding quality. Lastly, monitor embedding drift over time and update your embeddings periodically to ensure they reflect the latest knowledge in your target domain.

By implementing these tips across your components, you'll be able to enhance the performance and functionality of your RAG system, ensuring it’s optimized for both speed and accuracy. Keep testing, iterating, and refining your setup to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of AI development.

RAG Cost Calculator: A Free Tool to Calculate Your Cost in Seconds

Estimating the cost of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline involves analyzing expenses across vector storage, compute resources, and API usage. Key cost drivers include vector database queries, embedding generation, and LLM inference.

RAG Cost Calculator is a free tool that quickly estimates the cost of building a RAG pipeline, including chunking, embedding, vector storage/search, and LLM generation. It also helps you identify cost-saving opportunities and achieve up to 10x cost reduction on vector databases with the serverless option.

Calculate your RAG cost now.

Calculate your RAG cost

What Have You Learned?

By diving into this tutorial, you’ve unlocked the magic of building a powerful RAG system from scratch! You learned how LangChain acts as the glue, seamlessly orchestrating workflows to connect your data, models, and logic. With FAISS as your vector database, you now understand how to store and retrieve dense embeddings at lightning speed, enabling your system to find the most relevant information from vast datasets in real time. The Nomic Nomic Embed model transformed your raw text into rich, context-aware vectors, ensuring your AI understands nuances in the data, while Azure GPT-4o mini brought it all to life with its ability to generate human-like, accurate responses. Together, these tools create a dynamic pipeline where retrieval and generation work in harmony—supercharging applications like chatbots, research assistants, or content generators with both precision and creativity.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! You also picked up pro tips for optimizing performance, like tuning chunk sizes and balancing speed with accuracy, and even discovered a free RAG cost calculator to keep your projects budget-friendly. Imagine what’s next: you’re now equipped to build smarter AI tools, experiment with hybrid search strategies, or scale solutions for real-world problems. The possibilities are endless, and the skills you’ve gained are your launchpad. So go ahead—tweak those parameters, iterate on your designs, and let your creativity run wild. The future of intelligent applications is in your hands. Build something awesome, share it with the world, and remember: every line of code you write is a step toward shaping the next generation of AI! 🚀

Further Resources

🌟 In addition to this RAG tutorial, unleash your full potential with these incredible resources to level up your RAG skills.

How to Build a Multimodal RAG | Documentation
How to Enhance the Performance of Your RAG Pipeline
Graph RAG with Milvus | Documentation
How to Evaluate RAG Applications - Zilliz Learn
Generative AI Resource Hub | Zilliz

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