Create a chatbot that speaks to the Snowflake Cortex Analyst

Chat with the LLM-powered Snowflake Cortex Analyst.

Authentication

chat_cortex_analyst() picks up the following ambient Snowflake credentials:

• A static OAuth token defined via the SNOWFLAKE_TOKEN environment variable.

• Key-pair authentication credentials defined via the SNOWFLAKE_USER and SNOWFLAKE_PRIVATE_KEY (which can be a PEM-encoded private key or a path to one) environment variables.

• Posit Workbench-managed Snowflake credentials for the corresponding account.

• Viewer-based credentials on Posit Connect. Requires the connectcreds package.

Known limitations

Unlike most comparable model APIs, Cortex does not take a system prompt. Instead, the caller must provide a "semantic model" describing available tables, their meaning, and verified queries that can be run against them as a starting point. The semantic model can be passed as a YAML string or via reference to an existing file in a Snowflake Stage.

Note that Cortex does not support multi-turn, so it will not remember previous messages. Nor does it support registering tools, and attempting to do so will result in an error.

See chat_snowflake() to chat with more general-purpose models hosted on Snowflake.

chat_cortex_analyst(
  account = snowflake_account(),
  credentials = NULL,
  model_spec = NULL,
  model_file = NULL,
  api_args = list(),
  echo = c("none", "output", "all")
)

Arguments

account

A Snowflake account identifier, e.g. "testorg-test_account". Defaults to the value of the SNOWFLAKE_ACCOUNT environment variable.

credentials

A list of authentication headers to pass into httr2::req_headers(), a function that returns them when called, or NULL, the default, to use ambient credentials.

model_spec

A semantic model specification, or NULL when using model_file instead.

model_file

Path to a semantic model file stored in a Snowflake Stage, or NULL when using model_spec instead.

api_args

Named list of arbitrary extra arguments appended to the body of every chat API call. Combined with the body object generated by ellmer with modifyList().

echo

One of the following options:

• none: don't emit any output (default when running in a function).

• text: echo text output as it streams in (default when running at the console).

• all: echo all input and output.

Note this only affects the chat() method.

Value

A Chat object.

See also

Other chatbots: chat_anthropic(), chat_aws_bedrock(), chat_azure_openai(), chat_cloudflare(), chat_databricks(), chat_deepseek(), chat_github(), chat_google_gemini(), chat_groq(), chat_huggingface(), chat_mistral(), chat_ollama(), chat_openai(), chat_openrouter(), chat_perplexity(), chat_portkey()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # has_credentials("cortex")
chat <- chat_cortex_analyst(
  model_file = "@my_db.my_schema.my_stage/model.yaml"
)
chat$chat("What questions can I ask?")
}