Integrating OpenAI with a Spring Boot Application Using Spring AI

A detailed tutorial on how to create an AI language assistant using Spring AI

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

In this tutorial, you will learn the fundamental concepts of Spring AI and how to integrate it into your project. We will develop an AI assistant within a Spring Boot application to help students practice a foreign language.

Let’s get started! 🦾

Demo Project

Idea

Imagine you’re a foreign language student who wants to practice new vocabulary and grammar. If you’re learning by yourself, you can think about a situation you want to describe. For example, what did I eat for breakfast this morning, what did I do yesterday, and you name it.

However, you might become bored practicing the same scenario all over again. It’s challenging to think about new situations to practice a conversation alone. It would be helpful if someone started a story you can continue, wouldn’t it?

Let’s say you’ve just finished a lesson about clothes, and you want to put that new vocabulary into practice with a fun scenario. That’s where the AI assistant steps up. It’s got a vivid imagination and can whip up all sorts of stories for you to continue.

Technology background

What’s Spring AI?

Spring AI simplifies the development of applications that incorporate AI functionality. It provides a handy set of abstractions for AI models and services in Spring applications.

Spring AI use-cases

Spring AI can help in developing chatbots for natural language interactions, content generation and summarization, data analysis with visualizations, image recognition, and natural language processing.

It’s great at recommending things personalized for you, predicting when machines might break to avoid problems, and quickly spotting fraud while improving security.

Project setup

1. I’m using Maven for this demo. You’ll need the following dependencies:

   <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
   </dependency>
 
   <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.experimental.ai</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-ai-openai-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    <version>0.7.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
   </dependency>
 
   <dependency>
    <groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
    <artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
    <optional>true</optional>
   </dependency>

Note that the spring-ai dependency is available through the Milestones and Snapshots repositories. Add this to your repositories section in the pom.xml:

  <repository>
   <id>spring-milestones</id>
   <name>Spring Milestones</name>
   <url>https://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
   <snapshots>
    <enabled>false</enabled>
   </snapshots>
  </repository>
  <repository>
   <id>spring-snapshots</id>
   <name>Spring Snapshots</name>
   <url>https://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
   <releases>
    <enabled>false</enabled>
   </releases>
  </repository>

2. You’ll need an OpenAI api-key for this project. If you don’t have one already, please follow the instructions.

3. Once you have your key generated, add it to the application.yml in your project:

spring:
  ai:
    openai.api-key: YOUR_KEY

That’s everything you need to get started. Let’s continue with the coding part!