Elastic Field Engineering builds a GenAI customer support chatbot chat interface with RAG and streaming
Building a chat interface for a GenAI support assistant presented novel UI/UX challenges: users were left waiting with no feedback during slow LLM responses, streaming connections could hang silently for over a minute, and conveying complex multi-source conversation context inside a constrained UI required new design patterns.
The team shipped a custom chat interface using their EUI component library with a branded loading animation, a 10-second killswitch for stalled streams, and a prepended context-selector UI that lets users choose and edit multiple context sources before submitting a question.
The first LLM endpoint used for internal alpha-testing did not stream its responses, returning the entire answer in a single HTTP response body, which caused unacceptably long waits. Separately, live streaming connections would frequently return a 200 OK and then hang, with most failed streams taking over a minute to resolve.