Conversation

• 1: Conversation overview
• 2: How-To: Converse with an LLM using the conversation API

1 - Conversation overview

Dapr’s conversation API reduces the complexity of securely and reliably interacting with Large Language Models (LLM) at scale. Whether you’re a developer who doesn’t have the necessary native SDKs or a polyglot shop who just wants to focus on the prompt aspects of LLM interactions, the conversation API provides one consistent API entry point to talk to underlying LLM providers.

In addition to enabling critical performance and security functionality (like prompt caching and PII scrubbing), the conversation API also provides:

• Tool calling capabilities that allow LLMs to interact with external functions and APIs, enabling more sophisticated AI applications
• OpenAI-compatible interface for seamless integration with existing AI workflows and tools

You can also pair the conversation API with Dapr functionalities, like:

• Resiliency policies including circuit breakers to handle repeated errors, timeouts to safeguards from slow responses, and retries for temporary network failures
• Observability with metrics and distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry and Zipkin
• Middleware to authenticate requests to and from the LLM

Features

The following features are out-of-the-box for all the supported conversation components.

Prompt caching

The Conversation API includes a built-in caching mechanism (enabled by the cacheTTL parameter) that optimizes both performance and cost by storing previous model responses for faster delivery to repetitive requests. This is particularly valuable in scenarios where similar prompt patterns occur frequently. When caching is enabled, Dapr creates a deterministic hash of the prompt text and all configuration parameters, checks if a valid cached response exists for this hash within the time period (for example, 10 minutes), and returns the cached response immediately if found. If no match exists, Dapr makes the API call and stores the result. This eliminates external API calls, lowers latency, and avoids provider charges for repeated requests. The cache exists entirely within your runtime environment, with each Dapr sidecar maintaining its own local cache.

Personally identifiable information (PII) obfuscation

The PII obfuscation feature identifies and removes any form of sensitive user information from a conversation response. Simply enable PII obfuscation on input and output data to protect your privacy and scrub sensitive details that could be used to identify an individual.

The PII scrubber obfuscates the following user information:

• Phone number
• Email address
• IP address
• Street address
• Credit cards
• Social Security number
• ISBN
• Media Access Control (MAC) address
• Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) hex
• SHA-256 hex
• MD5 hex

Tool calling support

The conversation API supports advanced tool calling capabilities that allow LLMs to interact with external functions and APIs. This enables you to build sophisticated AI applications that can:

• Execute custom functions based on user requests
• Integrate with external services and databases
• Provide dynamic, context-aware responses
• Create multi-step workflows and automation

Tool calling follows OpenAI’s function calling format, making it easy to integrate with existing AI development workflows and tools.

Demo

Watch the demo presented during Diagrid’s Dapr v1.15 celebration to see how the conversation API works using the .NET SDK.

Try out conversation API

Quickstarts and tutorials

Want to put the Dapr conversation API to the test? Walk through the following quickstart and tutorials to see it in action:

Start using the conversation API directly in your app

Want to skip the quickstarts? Not a problem. You can try out the conversation building block directly in your application. After Dapr is installed, you can begin using the conversation API starting with the how-to guide.

Next steps

• How-To: Converse with an LLM using the conversation API
• Conversation API components

2 - How-To: Converse with an LLM using the conversation API

Let’s get started using the conversation API. In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Set up one of the available Dapr components (echo) that work with the conversation API.
• Add the conversation client to your application.
• Run the connection using dapr run.

Set up the conversation component

Create a new configuration file called conversation.yaml and save to a components or config sub-folder in your application directory.

Select your preferred conversation component spec for your conversation.yaml file.

For this scenario, we use a simple echo component.

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: echo
spec:
  type: conversation.echo
  version: v1

Use the OpenAI component

To interface with a real LLM, use one of the other supported conversation components, including OpenAI, Hugging Face, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and more.

For example, to swap out the echo mock component with an OpenAI component, replace the conversation.yaml file with the following. You’ll need to copy your API key into the component file.

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: openai
spec:
  type: conversation.openai
  metadata:
  - name: key
    value: <REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_KEY>
  - name: model
    value: gpt-4-turbo

Connect the conversation client

The following examples use the Dapr SDK client to interact with LLMs.

• .NET
• Java
• Python
• Go
• Rust

using Dapr.AI.Conversation;
using Dapr.AI.Conversation.Extensions;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddDaprConversationClient();

var app = builder.Build();

var conversationClient = app.Services.GetRequiredService<DaprConversationClient>();
var response = await conversationClient.ConverseAsync("conversation",
    new List<DaprConversationInput>
    {
        new DaprConversationInput(
            "Please write a witty haiku about the Dapr distributed programming framework at dapr.io",
            DaprConversationRole.Generic)
    });

Console.WriteLine("conversation output: ");
foreach (var resp in response.Outputs)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"\t{resp.Result}");
}

//dependencies
import io.dapr.client.DaprClientBuilder;
import io.dapr.client.DaprPreviewClient;
import io.dapr.client.domain.ConversationInput;
import io.dapr.client.domain.ConversationRequest;
import io.dapr.client.domain.ConversationResponse;
import reactor.core.publisher.Mono;

import java.util.List;

public class Conversation {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String prompt = "Please write a witty haiku about the Dapr distributed programming framework at dapr.io";

        try (DaprPreviewClient client = new DaprClientBuilder().buildPreviewClient()) {
            System.out.println("Input: " + prompt);

            ConversationInput daprConversationInput = new ConversationInput(prompt);

            // Component name is the name provided in the metadata block of the conversation.yaml file.
            Mono<ConversationResponse> responseMono = client.converse(new ConversationRequest("echo",
                    List.of(daprConversationInput))
                    .setContextId("contextId")
                    .setScrubPii(true).setTemperature(1.1d));
            ConversationResponse response = responseMono.block();
            System.out.printf("conversation output: %s", response.getConversationOutputs().get(0).getResult());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }
}

#dependencies
from dapr.clients import DaprClient
from dapr.clients.grpc._request import ConversationInput

#code
with DaprClient() as d:
    inputs = [
        ConversationInput(content="Please write a witty haiku about the Dapr distributed programming framework at dapr.io", role='user', scrub_pii=True),
    ]

    metadata = {
        'model': 'modelname',
        'key': 'authKey',
        'cacheTTL': '10m',
    }

    response = d.converse_alpha1(
        name='echo', inputs=inputs, temperature=0.7, context_id='chat-123', metadata=metadata
    )

    for output in response.outputs:
        print(f'conversation output: {output.result}')

package main

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	dapr "github.com/dapr/go-sdk/client"
	"log"
)

func main() {
	client, err := dapr.NewClient()
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	input := dapr.ConversationInput{
		Content: "Please write a witty haiku about the Dapr distributed programming framework at dapr.io",
		// Role:     "", // Optional
		// ScrubPII: false, // Optional
	}

	fmt.Printf("conversation input: %s\n", input.Content)

	var conversationComponent = "echo"

	request := dapr.NewConversationRequest(conversationComponent, []dapr.ConversationInput{input})

	resp, err := client.ConverseAlpha1(context.Background(), request)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("err: %v", err)
	}

	fmt.Printf("conversation output: %s\n", resp.Outputs[0].Result)
}

use dapr::client::{ConversationInputBuilder, ConversationRequestBuilder};
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;

type DaprClient = dapr::Client<dapr::client::TonicClient>;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Sleep to allow for the server to become available
    thread::sleep(Duration::from_secs(5));

    // Set the Dapr address
    let address = "https://127.0.0.1".to_string();

    let mut client = DaprClient::connect(address).await?;

    let input = ConversationInputBuilder::new("Please write a witty haiku about the Dapr distributed programming framework at dapr.io").build();

    let conversation_component = "echo";

    let request =
        ConversationRequestBuilder::new(conversation_component, vec![input.clone()]).build();

    println!("conversation input: {:?}", input.content);

    let response = client.converse_alpha1(request).await?;

    println!("conversation output: {:?}", response.outputs[0].result);
    Ok(())
}

Run the conversation connection

Start the connection using the dapr run command. For example, for this scenario, we’re running dapr run on an application with the app ID conversation and pointing to our conversation YAML file in the ./config directory.

• .NET
• Java
• Python
• Go
• Rust

dapr run --app-id conversation --dapr-grpc-port 50001 --log-level debug --resources-path ./config -- dotnet run

dapr run --app-id conversation --dapr-grpc-port 50001 --log-level debug --resources-path ./config -- mvn spring-boot:run

dapr run --app-id conversation --dapr-grpc-port 50001 --log-level debug --resources-path ./config -- python3 app.py

dapr run --app-id conversation --dapr-grpc-port 50001 --log-level debug --resources-path ./config -- go run ./main.go

dapr run --app-id=conversation --resources-path ./config --dapr-grpc-port 3500 -- cargo run --example conversation

Expected output

  - '== APP == conversation output: Please write a witty haiku about the Dapr distributed programming framework at dapr.io'

Advanced features

The conversation API supports the following features:

1. Prompt caching: Allows developers to cache prompts in Dapr, leading to much faster response times and reducing costs on egress and on inserting the prompt into the LLM provider’s cache.

2. PII scrubbing: Allows for the obfuscation of data going in and out of the LLM.

3. Tool calling: Allows LLMs to interact with external functions and APIs.

To learn how to enable these features, see the conversation API reference guide.

Conversation API examples in Dapr SDK repositories

Try out the conversation API using the full examples provided in the supported SDK repos.

• .NET
• Java
• Python
• Go
• Rust

Next steps

• Conversation quickstart
• Conversation API reference guide
• Available conversation components