Building an AI Chatbot with Gemini and Vercel Serverless Functions
A couple of months ago, I built an AI chatbot using React, Node.js, and Vercel Serverless Functions, which I have used in my web app. Here’s how I did it:
Architecture overview
- UI component: a React chat widget where user can input and the response would be rendered.
- Backend: a Vercel serverless function (e.g. api/chat) that validates the request, calls Gemini, and streams the output back to the browser.
Reference for Vercel’s serverless function →https://vercel.com/docs/functions
How does it work?
Browser → Vercel function → Gemini API → Response is streamed back to the browser, chunk by chunk, so the response from the backend would be sent in chunks instead of making the user wait long.
Prerequisites
- Node.js installed locally (Node 18+)
- A Gemini API key 🔑 from Google AI Studio https://aistudio.google.com/
- A Vercel account https://vercel.com/ and the Vercel CLI https://vercel.com/docs/cli
- npm install @google/genai in your function's project
process.env.GOOGLE_API_KEY...
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