3 Connecting AI models with the Vercel AI SDK
This chapter covers
- Overview of the Vercel AI SDK for React/Next.js
- Incorporating streaming AI responses in React apps
- Separating AI and UI state in React/Next.js
- Enhancing conversational UIs with multimedia content
When building our minimal AI application, we encountered several challenges. One was vendor lock-in. Since our direct API calls created a tight coupling with a single provider, it would be difficult to switch services if we ever needed to. A second has to do with streaming responses: Delivering AI responses in real-time is a critical user experience feature that requires significant, non-trivial architectural changes. Finally, there is the problem of state management. As applications grow, managing both UI state and the conversational state (memory) becomes a complex task requiring a robust, scalable solution.
Rather than building custom solutions for each of these problems, a better approach is to leverage a dedicated framework that provides these capabilities out of the box. Enter the Vercel AI SDK (https://vercel.com/docs/ai), an open-source framework developed by Vercel that offers powerful abstractions to streamline the development of AI projects in JavaScript and TypeScript.