Handling complex requests with planners

As we saw in the last section, the ability of Semantic Kernel to perform function calling by automatically invoking our functions can lead to powerful results.

However, function calling isn’t always enough.

If you have complex scenarios involving many different plugins and sources of data, the built-in function-calling capabilities may not perform adequately to meet your needs – or you may desire greater visibility into how different functions are chained together to generate your result.

Microsoft has an experimental Microsoft.SemanticKernel.Planners.OpenAI NuGet package that introduces a pair of automated planners to help with more complex tasks.

These planners, FunctionCallingStepwisePlanner and HandlebarsPlanner, may perform better with more complex tasks.

We’ll see how a planner works by showing FunctionCallingStepwisePlanner in action:

#r "nuget:Microsoft.SemanticKernel.Planners.OpenAI,1.16.0...