The Personal Assistant We'll Build › Your Assistant's First Words

## Our assistant's humble beginning
## (Don't worry about the details yet; we'll cover this in Chapter 3)

import os
from openai import OpenAI

## Initialize the client with your API key
client = OpenAI(
    api_key=os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY")
)  # Set your key as an environment variable


def ask_assistant(user_message):
    # Send a message to the language model and get a response
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-5",  # The language model we're using
        messages=[
            {
                "role": "system",
                "content": "You are a helpful personal assistant.",
            },  # Sets the assistant's behavior
            {"role": "user", "content": user_message},  # Your question
        ],
    )
    return response.choices[0].message.content


user_input = "What's the capital of France?"
answer = ask_assistant(user_input)
print(answer)