How to Create an RAG Chatbot AI Agent with n8n (No Code, Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Key Takeaways

today I'm going to be walking through step by step how to build this super simple question and answer AI agent like it says right there no code basically this agent is going to take information you give it so information about a company large database whatever it might be and then you're going to be able to chat with it to get the answers you need quicker than if you were to manually have to search through a document or multiple documents so wanted to start off here with just a quick demo so you guys know what it's going to look like and what it's going to do before we actually get into the process of building this thing so here is the example that I'm using today it's a PDF from Apple new features available with iOS 18 that just came out so it's got a ton of information here and if you wanted to read all that be my guest but I'm going to just build an agent that is going to tell us the key highlights basically so we get ask for highlights or we could ask for a specific question so in this case let's say um what is IOS smart reply it's going to search through that exact PDF that I just showed you guys and it's going to give us a nice concise answer so let's see what we get here the smart the iOS smart reply feature assists user in quickly responding to emails blah blah blah blah blah and the mail app message app so it's a very really quick summary it's very concise and it's better than having to search through here to find what we were looking for which actually yeah anyways so I just wanted to show you guys that but let's just get into the rest of this video let's see how we're going to build this thing so the resources needed today NN obviously that's where we're going to be building the workflows to make this agent pine cone this is the vector database tool that I've been using um if you don't really understand Vector databases that's okay basically it is just a way for agents to search through large amount of data much quicker than with a traditional relational database or any other store that you might be pulling information from so Google drive this is just where the PDF that I'm using is going to be pulled from and then open AI API obviously just to access that large language model of open AI in order to have the agent think and pull the right information that we need and make it concise and then as always with everything in life just have a good attitude okay so push data to Pine Cone um that's going to be the first workflow that we're doing today and then the second one is going to be the actual agent that's able to pull that data from Pine Cone and give us an answer so let's not waste any more time let's just get straight into this one here um so yeah the first step here would be grab some sort of document that you want a PDF um word anything but just push it into your Google Drive so that we can access it and then the next step is going to be you need to set up a pine cone Index this will take two seconds you're going to go to Pine Cone you're going to click here create new index the name can be whatever just make sure you understand what it was so anything mine is called sample really all we need to configure here is just going to be the model so we're going to do text embedding three small super simple that's all we need to do you can play around with stuff as you sort of understand more about these databases but for everything I do so far I've just left it all default so you're going to create that index I'm not going to do that cuz I already have one like I said mine is called sample and then we've got our name spaces here so um if you watch that last video about creating a simple email AI agent um that's what this contact name space is from but we're going to be pushing it into a new one we'll call it iOS or whatever but that is basically going to be right here so that's everything we really need to know about pine cone for now and setting up the the database now we're going to get into actually building this thing so the first workflow I said that we were going to be doing is um pushing the DAT into pine cone so we're just going to call this one push data you're going to want to do trigger manually is the the event that we're going to use to trigger this workflow as you can see there's all these different options basically you need to select what is going to start this workflow so in this case if we click test workflow that's what's going to start the process of the data moving through so we've got our trigger next we want to go into these node selection and grab Google Drive lots of actions here all we need to do for this one is download the file so when we test workflow it's going to download this file and then we'll be able to see it in in an end okay so a lot of these stuff you're going to have to configure um or sorry get set set up with credentials if you haven't done it yet so here's mine basically for this Google Drive tool you're going to click on create new credential um you need to basically enter a client ID in a client Secret in order to let um NN know that it has access to get into your drive or vice versa but if you click open docs it's going to be very super simple it's going to walk you through exactly what you need to do to get these credentials you'll go here you'll create a cloud account right here is mine you'll create a project and then really easy you're just going to go into enabled API and services as you can see I have these ones down here but you're just going to click into here and you'll grab like Google Drive search for that and then you'll see right here Google Drive API and all you have to do is enable it so mine is already enabled but you'll click a button right here that says enable then you're going to go back into into here you'll see credentials you're going to create itial oo client ID and then that is how you're going to get your client ID and your secret I'm not going to open up this right now but that's basically where you'll find it so you you'll copy and paste that into here but then with this URL you have to make sure that you set up your oo consent screen so make sure you go in here and set it up um this is just the one that I have right now you're going to add yourself as a test user otherwise you're not going to have permission to go back and forth basically or you can just publish the the app so any of these things um but when you're creating your oo consent screen that is where you'll be prompted it'll say like where is your udirect redirect URL so that's exactly what we're going to do and copy this right here but if I didn't explain that well enough like I said just click on open docs and you'll see step by step so go ahead and get that set up and then you'll be prompted to sign in you should be good to go once you get all that set up you'll be able to access your Google drive from NN so right now we're going to be grabbing the file type is a resource we want to download it and then here we have list URL or ID that's how it's going to access the file it's really nice that it has list because you can come in here and just search for exactly what oh exactly what file you want so ours is the iOS one and we want the pdf version um so then you can just test the step here you'll be able to see exactly like if it's working what the data looks like as it's coming in so as you can see it's coming in right here as binary and then we want to just view it to make sure that it it's the right PDF so this is exactly what we were looking at earlier so we're good to go the step is working next we need to click on this plus button right here and we want to add the pine cone Vector store this is going to allow us to push it into the vector store so that we can later access it so again you're going to have to set up your credential it's going to ask for an API key I already have mine set up so I'm just going to click on that but super simple again in Pine Cone right here API keys and and you're just going to copy this value so you'll just copy that paste it into NN and again you'll be good to go so operation here we don't want to retrieve a document that might be a later step but right now we want to insert documents because we're getting it from drive to Pine Cone again we're able to choose from a list which is super nice and that shows us that we have been configured properly so sample Index right here my index that we're using over here is called sample so that's good to go and then you have the option here to add a namespace I am going to add one just because it is going to keep our data more organized and it's easier to call it it also will help the agent figure out exactly what it's looking for once you start to add you know tons of different data into it but make sure that it's actually connected from this node to this node and then next we need to set up a couple more things with this Vector store tool so first one we want to set up this default data Lo keep that as default and then I'm going to do recursive to recursive character text splitter um I'm going to leave the chunk size is a th because the PDF is pretty big the chunk size is basically how many characters it's going to pull because it's going to be pulling in batches from the database and then the overlap is just how many characters overlap between chunks and I'm just going to leave that as zero so going to go there and then we just need to add the embedding to Pine Cone so open Ai and then this is where you'll set up the this credential I'm pretty sure this is the last one so again API key you'll go into open Ai and you'll have your API keys right over here on the side and then you're just going to grab that key copy it yeah the nice thing about it is once you have everything set up they'll stay set up so yeah you want to make sure that this embedding is three small because that's how we set up our pine cone store and then um save that we should be good to go so if we're going to hit test workflow it's going to start running we can see that it's going to Google Drive it's grabbing our PDF then it pushed it into pine cone successfully I hope but we can go check right here Nam space It should come through here as iOS since that's what I named it let's just refresh that here oh no I know what happened important step so um right here default data loader we had this as Json and we need to change this to Binary because if you remember over here this data came through as binary if you go to Json there's nothing showing up so make sure that this make sure you're aware of how your data is coming through because in this case nothing was being pushed into pine cone because we didn't set up this loader as binary data so we can leave all that save Let's test it again this should work otherwise now I'm lost so okay we're good to go Nam space it should push in here there we go iOS perfect okay so we're done with this workflow we're going to go back out we're going to make a new one and then this is going to be our Q&A agent okay the first step is again what triggers this workflow this time we're going to go on chat message because we want to chat with this agent to get it to work with us leave that for now okay now we're going to add in the actual entity of the agent so click on this plus and we're going to go down to Advanced AI now you could do a question and answer chain because that's essentially what we want this agent to do but it's good to get in the habit of setting everything up through an AI agent because then you're able to give it access to more tools um more scenarios that sort of thing so tools agent um all of this can be the same and eventually we need to add the system message prompt I'm going to leave that blank for now we'll prompt it near the end but hopefully I don't forget cuz sometimes I forget but that's the agent the chat model we're going to use is open AI we've already got that configured I'm going to use 40 the memory we're going to give it is Windows buffer memory we can leave everything there it's going to have five messages of contacts that it's going to keep as we keep chatting it'll keep saving the previous five messages in order to look back and see like how the conversation was going but we don't have to touch anything really and that's just a very simple easy way to give the agent some sort of memory to have a conversational flow and then tools so we're going to go and add pine cone or vector store this is going to be our iOS um information description you want to call this tool to access information to answer the users questions just leave it as simple as that okay model open ashat model we pretty much always do this and we always do 40 you don't have to always do 40 I think uh 40 mini is a little cheaper uh 3.5 Works they all work but 40 just is kind of the most consistent I found so yeah then in the vector store we want to add the pine cone this is again our credential this time we want to retrieve documents we're not inserting so we did that earlier now we're retrieving and then once again from list sample and make sure if you pushed it earlier if you push your data into a name space over here so ours is an iOS make sure that you call that namespace out again otherwise your agent will be a little lost okay so we got that set up we do need to add the embedding right here again though um and this is going to be three small cuz we've done three small throughout every step so far okay save that now okay I was about to say we're going to test it but we need to prompt it because always forget that so this is like I said you're able to take a screenshot of your workspace and put that in the chat and that's super useful in order to actually prompt stuff so I'm dragging in this one over here you can see I did this earlier but let's just go ahead and do that again so there's that screenshot I'm going to say prompt this agent to answer questions from from the user we want to include jeez I cannot type today include background context and instructions also tell the agent to answer concisely okay so if you guys know stuff about agents or at least a little bit about agents if you know about prompting prompting is super super important to ensuring your agent is working consistently and working exactly the way you want it to a lot of times if it's erroring it might be an issue just with the prompting rather than an actual thing you set up in the tools so this is not the way I would advise to prompt your agent um if they're complicated and if it's like a big high stakes project but when you're playing around with making agents this quick way works super well so background and context we've got our models we've got our tools um it's got instructions so let's let's throw this in here and we'll test it out and see see what see if we like it or not okay and we'll save that so let's see what we want to ask it about let's ask about what gen Emoji is since we're in the AI space right now what is IOS 18 gen Emoji gen Emoji is a feature introduced in iOS 18 that enables users to create unique gen Emoji Style stickers directly from the keyboard dog on a surfboard cool um let's see what else can we ask it let's go can you give a summary of coolest features in iOS 18 this may not work because I don't know how it's going to well it probably will but it needs to think about what does coolest mean so let's see what it gives us here oh wow the iOS 18 introduces several Cutting Edge features designed to enhance user convenience accessibility and overall experience experience here's a summary of the coolest features eye tracking pretty cool music haptics also pretty cool wow yeah J Emoji's number seven on the cool list I would say that's probably top five but that's really not what this video is about okay so that's all that this agent going to be doing for us today I know that it was pretty simple but hopefully you understand all the aspects of what goes into it all the tools what they each do it's super important to get that basic understanding down because then you can go in here and you can start adding more tools and you can start calling more workflows and then you can start pushing data off of the agent or pushing data from agent to a different agent so just wanted to help give you guys a basic understanding and if you enjoyed you know please let me know what what else you want to see um I'm going to try to be tailoring a lot of Contour content super step by- step um super easy to follow and to beginners so if that sounds like something that you enjoy then definitely stick around but besides that thanks guys