Intro to Chatbots with HuggingFace

See how to work with open-source LLMs and Chatbots with HuggingFace

George Pipis
3 min readMar 15, 2024

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the Transformers library from HuggingFace to build chatbot pipelines. Let’s start by installing the transformers library:

pip install transformers

Once we install the library, we can move on. We will work with the ‘blenderbot-400M-distill’ model from Meta. This is a small open-source model (700 MB) that performs relatively well. Let’s start with the pipeline.

from transformers import pipeline

chatbot = pipeline(task="conversational",
model="./models/facebook/blenderbot-400M-distill")

At this point, I will initiate the conversation by passing the following message:

My name is George and I’m from Greece. Have you ever been to my country?

user_message = """
My name is George and I'm from Greece. Have you ever been to my country?
"""

from transformers import Conversation

conversation = Conversation(user_message)

print(conversation)

Output:

Conversation id: b1f14acb-7d8c-47c8-9fd4-4c587acbd6ad
user:
My name is George and I am from Greece. Have you ever been to my country?

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