function-tools-approvals

Using function tools with human in the loop approvals

::: zone pivot="programming-language-csharp"

This tutorial step shows you how to use function tools that require human approval with an agent, where the agent is built on the Azure OpenAI Chat Completion service.

When agents require any user input, for example to approve a function call, this is referred to as a human-in-the-loop pattern. An agent run that requires user input, will complete with a response that indicates what input is required from the user, instead of completing with a final answer. The caller of the agent is then responsible for getting the required input from the user, and passing it back to the agent as part of a new agent run.

Prerequisites

For prerequisites and installing NuGet packages, see the Create and run a simple agent step in this tutorial.

Create the agent with function tools

When using functions, it's possible to indicate for each function, whether it requires human approval before being executed. This is done by wrapping the AIFunction instance in an ApprovalRequiredAIFunction instance.

Here is an example of a simple function tool that fakes getting the weather for a given location.

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Linq;
using Azure.AI.OpenAI;
using Azure.Identity;
using Microsoft.Agents.AI;
using Microsoft.Extensions.AI;
using OpenAI;

[Description("Get the weather for a given location.")]
static string GetWeather([Description("The location to get the weather for.")] string location)
    => $"The weather in {location} is cloudy with a high of 15°C.";

To create an AIFunction and then wrap it in an ApprovalRequiredAIFunction, you can do the following:

AIFunction weatherFunction = AIFunctionFactory.Create(GetWeather);
AIFunction approvalRequiredWeatherFunction = new ApprovalRequiredAIFunction(weatherFunction);

When creating the agent, you can now provide the approval requiring function tool to the agent, by passing a list of tools to the AsAIAgent method.