Long-running Streaming Tool

[enxilium]

Hi! I was wondering how to keep a streaming tool active for prolonged periods of time (several hours). The idea is for my agent to monitor the user's calendar and speak up when an event is about to arrive. However, I heard the maximum session time is 12 minutes, which means the streaming tool would be forcibly ended.

A potential workaround I thought of was keeping the monitor elsewhere if a session is not currently active, and manually activating a session when it's the right time. Is this the only approach?

Thank you!

[adk-bot]

Response from ADK Answering Agent (experimental, answer may be inaccurate)

TLDR: Your proposed workaround is the correct approach for this use case. Due to the session time limit, a long-running process should not be implemented within the streaming tool itself. Instead, an external process should monitor the calendar and initiate an ADK session when needed.

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Hi enxilium,

That's an excellent question and your proposed workaround is indeed the recommended approach for handling long-running tasks with ADK.

As you correctly pointed out, ADK sessions have a maximum duration (currently 12 minutes), after which they are terminated. This is by design to ensure resource efficiency and to handle the stateless nature of interactions. Therefore, a streaming tool within a session is not suitable for continuous, multi-hour monitoring tasks.

The best practice for your use case is to have a separate, persistent process (running on a server, a cloud function, or even a local background service) that monitors the user's calendar. When this monitoring process detects an upcoming event, it can then initiate a new ADK session to deliver the notification to the user.

This architectural pattern decouples the long-running monitoring logic from the user interaction logic, which is handled by ADK. This has several advantages:

• Reliability: The monitoring process is not affected by ADK session timeouts.
• Scalability: You can manage the monitoring process independently of the ADK application.
• Efficiency: ADK sessions are only active when needed, which is more resource-efficient.

Here is a relevant document about function tools that you might find useful: [1]

I hope this helps!

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[1] https://google.github.io/adk-docs/tools/function-tools/