Discussion on Chat Memory components

[TuanaCelik]

This is the discussion board for a group of experimental components introduced as a solution to implement chat memory for chat with RAG-like use-cases.

• ChatMessageWriter
• ChatMessageRetriever
• InMemoryChatMessageStore

🧑‍🍳 Try the Cookbook here

Let us know how you get along with these components, and please do let us know if you have any feedback.

Note: Experimental features live in this repository for a fixed period of time. We don't guarantee that we will continue maintaining experimental features. But if they are successful, stable and if you like it, we will move the feature to the core Haystack package.

PS: The contributor for the first version of these experimental components is @vblagoje 🚀

[shadeMe]

From @anakin87

While preparing a notebook on Tools, I needed some form of short-term memory of the conversation.
I tried to use ChatMessageStore, ChatMessageWriter, andChatMessageRetriever.

Unfortunately, I have encountered some roadblocks with the ChatMessageRetriever.
You can find my experiments in this notebook.

---

Main problems I have encountered:
ChatMessageRetriever has no input sockets

• cannot receive any input from other components
• cannot be placed in a conditional branch
• must be placed at the beginning of a Pipeline
• since it does not need inputs, it always runs

I am aware of the ongoing work on the ChatMessageRetriever (see deepset-ai/haystack#8258), but my impression is that most of these issues will remain.

Given that my use case is not very exotic, I think it would be beneficial to reflect on how to improve and make this experimental component more flexible.

[kkmarv]

I want to leave my feedback as well and say that I greatly appreciate the Chat Memory components and think they are very useful. In my case I've used them for bootstrapping small examples I can show to colleagues.

However, I just want to point out a small inconsistency in the cookbook. In Build The Pipeline it says that a ListJoiner component will come to Haystack in version 2.8.0 which has just released. This is confusing since version 2.8.0 did not implement such a component. I would be glad to use it though!