📘 Introduction

Chatbots are no longer just futuristic concepts—they’re now powering customer service, virtual assistants, and productivity tools everywhere. With the OpenAI Python SDK, you can build a powerful conversational model in just a few lines of code. And when paired with Gradio, you get a clean, interactive web interface without needing any front-end skills.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a chatbot that connects Gradio’s chat UI with the OpenAI Python API. By the end, you’ll have a working chatbot you can run locally or share with the world.

✅ Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:
🐍☑️ Python installed
📦☑️ Pip installed
🌐☑️ A virtual environment (venv) created
🔑☑️ An OpenAI API key generated (get one fromOpenAI)
🔐☑️ OpenAI API key set as an environment variable (OPENAI_API_KEY="your_api_key_here")

💡
No front-end skills needed — Gradio handles that for you! 🎨

📦1️⃣ Install Libraries

Activate your virtual environment and install the following packages:

pip install gradio openai

📥2️⃣ Import Libraries

Create a new file called app.py and import the required modules:

import gradio as gr
from openai import OpenAI

🤖3️⃣ Build your Chatbot with Streamlit and OpenAI Python SDK

Now that our file and imports are ready, let’s add the chatbot logic and interface. Paste the following code into app.py:

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