In a discussion about AI Assistants with web search capability, Paxxxxx inquired whether Discourse’s AI Assistant supports OpenAI’s Responses API (including o4-mini) with web search tools, and whether it can be integrated with custom agents like Make.com. Falco confirmed that web search is supported via Discourse’s own implementation using a Google API key, and that custom tool integrations are fully possible. sam elaborated that Discourse AI is API-agnostic and offers a flexible tool system, including built-in Google search via the official Google Search API. The Responses API from OpenAI supports statefulness, search, and file search — albeit slower than the conversation API — and similar capabilities exist with Gemini via search grounding. A working example of web search in action is available here. The built-in tools are documented in the Discourse AI GitHub repo.
I would like to subscribe to Discourse especially for the AI Assistant.
Does it support OpenAI Response API + o4-mini with tool usage like web_search?
Eg: i’d like users to use the assistant to do SERP research and provide a factual answer.
If not, can I wire AI Assistants to my own custom agent implementation (like Make.com or custom API calls)?
Thank you!
Yes, but the web search feature happens in Discourse, and you need a Google API key.
Yes, you can write any tool integration you want.
Expanding a bit on responses API.
The responses API from Open AI supports state-fullness, search, computer use and file search. This API is a bit slower than the conversation API, but allows end users to tap in to the OpenAI implemented search.
Google support a similar scheme with Gemini models (see search grounding)
Discourse AI from very early days opted to be as API agnostic as possible, so we implemented a first class tool and custom tool system.
You can see the full list of built in tools at: discourse-ai/lib/personas/tools at main · discourse/discourse-ai · GitHub
One of the tools we support is Google (search). It leans on the official Google search API to retrieve results.
This allows you to do stuff such as this: Exploring Gemini 2.5 Pro: AI Advancements - AI Conversation - Discourse Meta