Designing Our Research Assistant
Explore the design phase of building an intelligent Research Assistant that automates a manual research workflow. Understand how to architect a monolithic AI agent using Google ADK. Learn to plan the agent's instruction prompt and equip it with tools like Wikipedia, arXiv, and Google Search to autonomously gather and synthesize information into a single report.
In our journey so far, we have successfully established a working development environment and have seen how to create and run a basic AI agent. We are now ready to move from simple demonstrations to designing and building a practical, multi-step agent that can solve a tangible, real-world problem.
This process mirrors professional software engineering best practices. Before writing a single line of implementation code, it is crucial to first establish a clear plan. This involves understanding the problem we aim to solve, defining what a successful solution looks like, and creating a robust architectural blueprint for the system we intend to build. This lesson is dedicated to that design and planning phase. We will architect our “Research Assistant” from the ground up, ensuring we have a complete and coherent plan before implementation begins.
The problem statement: The manual research workflow
To appreciate the value of the agent we are about to build, let’s first consider a common and relatable scenario. Imagine a student, analyst, or researcher tasked with getting up to speed on a complex and rapidly evolving topic, such as “CRISPR gene editing.” The goal is to produce a concise summary that includes a general overview, recent academic findings, and supplementary web resources.
The manual workflow to accomplish this is often fragmented, inefficient, and requires a great deal of context switching. It typically looks something like this:
Initial overview: The researcher opens a web browser and navigates to Wikipedia. They search for “CRISPR” to gain a high-level, basic understanding of the topic, what it is, its history, and its key applications. They read through the article, identifying the most important concepts.
Academic literature review: Next, they open a new browser tab and navigate to an academic repository like arXiv.org or Google ...