Chat focuses on the interaction itself, while assistants focus on providing specific services or functionalities through that interaction. Chat can be simple or complex and serves a broad range of purposes, whereas assistants are typically more structured and goal-oriented, designed to accomplish specific tasks.

As a rough guideline:

  • Use chat as your daily companion for brainstorming, drafting emails, and debugging code.
  • Build assistants for specific, repetitive tasks. If you notice that you are using the same prompts repeatedly in chat for a particular task or topic, it’s time to build an assistant. This way, you can avoid providing instructions as well as attaching documents each time.

Check out our guides for how to use the chat and how to build assistants to dive deeper into each feature!

Was this page helpful?

Chat capabilitiesAssistant Library