OpenBB Copilot

OpenBB Copilot is your AI companion that helps you interact with OpenBB Workspace, and perform a wide variety of research and analysis tasks.

With OpenBB Copilot, you can:

• Answer general knowledge questions
• Interact with widgets added explicitly to its context
• Interact with your uploaded files
• Automatically use data from the dashboard
• Automatically retrieve data using the OpenBB API or any custom backend you have added
• Create charts, tables, and other text artifacts, like summaries
• Iteratively manipulate and transform data and charts
• Be used to search the web for additional information
• Provide citations

Introduction

To use OpenBB Copilot, click on the purple icon located at the center right of the Workspace screen:

Under most circumstances, you can treat OpenBB Copilot like a personal research assistant. OpenBB Copilot has access to the widgets (including your uploaded files) on your currently-active dashboard, the OpenBB API and any custom backend endpoints you have added to OpenBB Workspace.

By utilizing all of these sources of data, OpenBB Copilot can assist you in performing a wide variety of research and analysis tasks.

Understanding Chats

OpenBB Copilot is a chat-based assistant that leverages multiple LLMs (Large Language Models) under-the-hood to understand your queries and provide answers.

Since OpenBB Copilot is a chat-based assistant, it maintains a conversation history to provide contextual responses. This means you can have natural back-and-forth discussions, ask follow-up questions, and refine your queries based on previous responses. The conversation history helps OpenBB Copilot understand the context of your questions and provide more relevant and personalized assistance throughout your interaction.

For example, if you ask about the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, and then follow up by asking about other important financial ratios, OpenBB Copilot will understand the context and suggest relevant ratios:

If you'd like to clear the history of the current conversation, you can do so by clicking on the trashcan icon in the upper right corner of the OpenBB Copilot window. It is highly recommended to clear the chat history when you have a new question that is unrelated to your current conversation, to prevent confusing OpenBB Copilot:

General question answering

The simplest functionality of OpenBB Copilot is its general question answering capability. For example, you can ask Copilot things like:

• "What's the difference between stocks and bonds?"
• "Explain inflation."
• "Can you explain the concept of dollar-cost averaging?"

For general questions, OpenBB Copilot will rely on its underlying model's extensive training data to formulate answers. We suggest you spend some time
exploring this functionality with a range of questions across different topics to get a feel for how OpenBB Copilot works and behaves.

Interacting with data sources using OpenBB Copilot

For OpenBB Copilot, widgets are data sources that can be used to retrieve data relevant to answer your queries. OpenBB Copilot uses the current values of widget parameters (e.g. symbol, start date, etc.) as suggestions to answer your query, but it can also change them if required.

This allows you to treat a widget as a data that can return data for multiple tickers and inputs, rather than just the data that is currently being displayed.

Widgets have the following priority:

1. Widgets added to the context explicitly
2. Widgets in the currently-active dashboard
3. Any widget available to be added to the OpenBB app, including widgets from custom backends or API endpoints (optional)

You can toggle on/off global widgets (option 3) the button highlighted in the image below.

Analyze specific widgets only

Sometimes, you might want OpenBB Copilot to analyze data from only a specific widget (or set of widgets) on your dashboard. For example, if you want to deep dive into an earnings transcript, and ignore all other widgets on your dashboard, you can do so by clicking on the "Add widgets as context" button on the widgets you want OpenBB Copilot to use:

The OpenBB Copilot chat window will also show you which widgets are currently selected as explicitly-added context:

Automatically use data from the dashboard

OpenBB Copilot can access information from all widgets you have added to your currently-active dashboard. If no widgets have been explicitly added to the context, OpenBB Copilot will fallback to retrieve data from widgets on the currently-active dashboard if they are required to answer your query.

For example, if you add the "Historical Stock Price" widget to your dashboard, you can ask OpenBB Copilot to give you the monthly highs for a particular year for AAPL, and OpenBB Copilot will use the "Historical Stock Price" widget to provide an answer:

Also note how OpenBB Copilot displays the reasoning steps that it took to retrieve the data:

OpenBB Copilot also provides a citation for the data source after its response.

To learn more about reasoning steps and citations, please see the Reasoning Steps and Citations sections below.

note

Sometimes, you might need to be more specific with your query when you want Copilot to use one or more widgets from your dashboard, since vague queries might lead OpenBB Copilot to retrieve the data automatically from all of the available data sources it has access to (See more about this capability in the Automatically using data sources available to OpenBB Workspace section below).

To remedy this, simply add a phrase such as "Use the widgets on my dashboard" to the end of your query to "nudge" OpenBB Copilot to retrieve the data from the relevant widgets on your dashboard.

Using your own files

OpenBB Copilot can also analyze and answer questions using files you provide, such as PDF, CSV, and XLSX files.

To add a file to OpenBB Copilot, first upload it and add it as a widget to the currently-active dashboard.

The file can then be used by OpenBB Copilot to answer questions (either by adding the file widget to the context explicitly, or by allowing OpenBB Copilot to automatically retrieve the data if it is relevant to your query).

Alternatively, you can also upload files directly to OpenBB Copilot by clicking on the paper clip icon in the OpenBB Copilot window. Files uploaded directly to OpenBB Copilot in this manner will not be persisted between sessions:

note

When uploading files directly to OpenBB Copilot, we use filenames to determine if a file is relevant to your query. For best results, use descriptive filenames. For example, if you have a technical report from Tesla released in 2024, a good filename would be tsla_technical_report_2024.pdf.

Automatically using data sources available to OpenBB Workspace

OpenBB Copilot can also access external data sources to provide additional insights. This allows you to ask questions that go beyond the data displayed on your dashboard.

External data can be retrieved from all data sources available to OpenBB, including the OpenBB API (which powers first-party widgets), and any custom backend endpoints that you have added.

note

OpenBB Copilot prioritizes data in the following order:

1. Explicitly-added context widgets
2. Data from widgets on the currently-active dashboard
3. Data from the OpenBB API or any active custom backend.

For example, you can ask OpenBB Copilot to fetch the latest stock price for a specific company, or to provide a summary of the latest news for a particular stock without having to add a widget to your dashboard, as long as you have the global data toggle enabled.

If OpenBB Copilot retrieved data directly from a data source, you can add that data to your dashboard by hovering over the appropriate citation, and clicking on the "Add to dashboard" button:

Producing charts and tables using OpenBB Copilot

OpenBB Copilot can produce charts and tables using the data that it has access to. We call these special outputs "artifacts".

For charts, OpenBB Copilot can currently produce the following plot types:

• Line chart
• Vertical bar chart
• Scatter plot

To produce a chart or a table, mention the output that you want in your query. For example, to produce a chart of the latest stock price for Apple, you can ask OpenBB Copilot to "Create a chart of the latest stock price for Apple":

If you want a table instead, you can just modify your query slightly to ask for a table:

This behaviour works across all structured data.

Converting artifacts to widgets

Every artifact that OpenBB Copilot generates can be converted to a widget. To do this, click the "Create widget from [text, table, or chart]" button:

This will create a new widget on your dashboard containing the artifact.

note

The newly-created widget contains all of the data in the artifact, so you can interact with it just like any other widget on your dashboard (including switching between different types of charts, or toggling between chart and table views, or adding it as explicitly-added context to OpenBB Copilot for further analysis).

Searching the web

OpenBB Copilot has the ability to search the web. It will use it when it doesn't find the required data to answer your prompt on the dashboard (or product); or if you are looking for news.

You can also explicitly ask for it using the tagging @web.

Reasoning Steps

As OpenBB Copilot goes through the process of answering your query, it will show you the reasoning steps it took to arrive at the answer. These reasoning steps appear above Copilot's responses. Reasoning steps can be expanded to see more information about the intermediate steps OpenBB Copilot took to arrive at the answer:

The reasoning steps can contain parameters for data sources, internal queries, which files are accessed, intermediate artifacts, and more.

Citations

When accessing data (whether from widgets on your dashboard, files you have uploaded, or external data sources), OpenBB Copilot will always cite the data source it referenced when responding to your query:

If the widget that was cited is present on your dashboard with the same arguments used by OpenBB Copilot, hovering over the citation will give you the option to scroll to that widget.

If the widget is not present or the arguments were changed, hovering over the citation will give you the option to add the data to your dashboard.

Prompting guidelines

The OpenBB Copilot is designed to assist you in your research and analysis. To get the most out of OpenBB Copilot, it is important to have a good understanding of prompting techniques.

We recommend reading through the OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide to learn more about how to structure your prompts to get the best results.