ChatKit is a batteries-included framework for building high-quality, AI-powered chat experiences. It’s designed for developers who want to add advanced conversational intelligence to their apps fast—with minimal setup and no reinventing the wheel. ChatKit delivers a complete, production-ready chat interface out of the box.

Key features include:

• Deep UI customization so that ChatKit feels like a first-class part of your app
• Built-in response streaming for interactive, natural conversations
• Tool and workflow integration for visualizing agentic actions and chain-of-thought reasoning
• Rich interactive widgets rendered directly inside the chat
• Attachment handling with support for file and image uploads
• Thread and message management for organizing complex conversations
• Source annotations and entity tagging for transparency and references

Simply drop the ChatKit component into your app, configure a few options, and you're good to go.

What makes ChatKit different?

ChatKit is a framework-agnostic, drop-in chat solution. You don’t need to build custom UIs, manage low-level chat state, or patch together various features yourself. Just add the ChatKit component, give it a client token, and customize the chat experience as needed, no extra work needed.

Quickstart

1. Generate a client token on your server.

   from fastapi import FastAPI
   from pydantic import BaseModel
   from openai import OpenAI
   import os
   
   app = FastAPI()
   openai = OpenAI(api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"])
   
   @app.post("/api/chatkit/session")
   def create_chatkit_session():
       session = openai.chatkit.sessions.create({
         # ...
       })
       return { client_secret: session.client_secret }
   

2. Install the React bindings

   npm install @openai/chatkit-react
   

3. Add the ChatKit JS script to your page

   <script
     src="https://cdn.platform.openai.com/deployments/chatkit/chatkit.js"
     async
   ></script>
   

4. Render ChatKit

   import { ChatKit, useChatKit } from '@openai/chatkit-react';
   
   export function MyChat() {
     const { control } = useChatKit({
       api: {
         async getClientSecret(existing) {
           if (existing) {
             // implement session refresh
           }
   
           const res = await fetch('/api/chatkit/session', {
             method: 'POST',
             headers: {
               'Content-Type': 'application/json',
             },
           });
           const { client_secret } = await res.json();
           return client_secret;
         },
       },
     });
   
     return <ChatKit control={control} className="h-[600px] w-[320px]" />;
   }
   

See working examples

• Starter app - Clone a repo to start with a fully working template
• Samples - See working examples of ChatKit and get inspired

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.