Build a Local AI Agent to Chat with Financial Charts Using Agno

Are you interested in building an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions about financial charts? If so, this article might be interesting for you!

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AI-powered chatbots for analyzing financial charts offer great potential for the financial sector. These chatbots can identify chart patterns and trends, helping investors make informed decisions.

Creating multimodal chatbots can be time-consuming and complex, but Python packages like Chainlit and Agno make it much easier. With Agno, you can build multimodal agents that handle text, image, audio, and video. Agents are intelligent programs that solve problems autonomously.

In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to build an AI-powered chatbot that can analyze financial charts locally. In our demo app, we use a financial chart from the StocksGuide* app.

Let’s get started.

Sneak Peak

Tech Stack

For our demo app, we use Meta’s Llama3.2-vision as LLM. The Llama 3.2-vision models are optimized for visual recognition, image reasoning, captioning, and answering general questions about an image.

To create the app, we use the following frameworks:

• Chainlit as an intuitive chatbot UI
• Agno to implement the AI agent

ℹ️ We’ve written a comprehensive article about Chainlit. If you are not familiar with Chainlit, we recommend reading this article first.

Prerequisites

You will need the following prerequisites:

• Python package manager of your choice (We use conda).
• A code editor of your choice (We use Visual Studio Code).
• Download Ollama and install Llama3.2-vision. Make sure that it runs on your computer.
• A computer with a GPU (We use a MacBook Pro M4 Max 48 GB).

We recommend a computer with at least 16GB RAM to run the examples in this guide efficiently.

Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Setup the development environment

• Create a conda environment: A virtual environment keeps your main system clean.

conda create -n chat-with-charts-agent python=3.12.7
conda activate chat-with-charts-agent

• Clone the GitHub repo:

git clone https://github.com/tinztwins/finllm-apps.git

• Install requirements: Go to the folder chat-with-financial-charts and run the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Make sure that Ollama is running on your computer:

Step 2: Create the app with Chainlit and Agno

• Import required libraries: First, we need to import all necessary libraries. In addition to the Chainlit package, we import Ollama, Agent, and Image via Agno.

import chainlit as cl
from agno.agent import Agent
from agno.models.ollama import Ollama
from agno.media import Image

• Start a new chat session: Every Chainlit app follows a life cycle. The framework starts a new chat session whenever a user opens the Chainlit app. When a new chat session starts, Chainlit triggers the on_chat_start() function. Moreover, we can store data in memory during the user session. This allows us to keep the agent object using the command cl.user_session.set("agent", agent).

@cl.on_chat_start
async def on_chat_start():

  # Agent logic (Learn more in the next section)

  cl.user_session.set("agent", agent)

• Create an agent: In Agno, you can create an agent with Agent(). You can pass this object several parameters, e.g. model, description, instructions, and add_history_to_messages. We use Llama 3.2-Vision as a large language model. It provides reasoning and visual recognition capabilities to the agent.

• Description and instructions: With the description parameter, you can guide the overall behavior of the agent. This information is added to the agent’s system message at the beginning. In addition, you can provide the agent with a list of instructions using the instructions parameter.

• Add chat history to the agent: To allow the agent to access the chat history during the conversation, we set the parameter add_history_to_messages to True. markdown=True ensures that the output format is Markdown.

# Agent Code

agent = Agent(
      model=Ollama(id="llama3.2-vision"), 
      description="You are a helpful AI-powered investment analyst who can analyze financial charts.",
      instructions=["Analyze the images carefully and give precise answers."],
      add_history_to_messages=True,
      markdown=True,
  )

• New message from the user: The on_message decorator reacts to messages from the Chainlit UI. When a new message is received, the function on_message(message: cl.Message) is called. The message object contains the user’s input.

• Store images in a list: The first line in the on_message() function is a list comprehension and creates a list of image objects from files in message.elements with an image MIME type. Moreover, we can access the agent object from memory.

• Run the agent and stream response: In the for loop, we pass the images and the user’s message to the LLM. The make_async() function takes a synchronous function and returns an asynchronous function that runs the original function in a separate thread. The agent.run() function is used to execute an agent and obtain a response. We set stream=True so that we receive the answer in a stream.

@cl.on_message
async def on_message(message: cl.Message):

  images = [Image(filepath=file.path) for file in message.elements if "image" in file.mime]

  agent = cl.user_session.get("agent")

  msg = cl.Message(content="")
  for chunk in await cl.make_async(agent.run)(message.content, images=images, stream=True):
      await msg.stream_token(chunk.get_content_as_string())
  
  await msg.send()

Step 3: Run the app

• Start the demo app: Navigate to the project folder and run the following command:

chainlit run app.py

• Access the demo app: Open http://localhost:8000 in your web browser and enter a question about the uploaded financial chart.

Conclusion

Great! You have built a local AI agent to chat with financial charts. The Python libraries Chainlit and Agno offer a solid base for building advanced AI applications.

You can use the demo app as a starting point for your next project. Feel free to share your project on social media and mention us so we can see what you’re working on.

Happy coding!

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