The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source protocol announced by Anthropic in 2024 to standardize interactions between large language models (LLMs) and external tools and data sources.
MCP facilitates communication between hosts, clients, and servers to enable complex tasks through natural language.
The article guides on building a research paper management chatbot using MCP, allowing functionalities like searching for academic papers, organizing articles, accessing metadata, and generating documents.
The process involves setting up a local environment, understanding MCP's structure with hosts, clients, and servers, creating tools, resources, and prompts within the MCP server, and connecting to third-party MCP servers.
An MCP chatbot class, MCP_ChatBot, is built to manage connections, tools, and user queries efficiently.
The chatbot connects with multiple servers, allowing users to search for articles, extract information from papers, and fetch data from URLs.
Key features of the chatbot include organization by topic, persistent storage of metadata, interactive chat UI, smart summaries, and efficient tool and resource management.
The article emphasizes the significance of MCP in simplifying AI application development by standardizing data interactions.
Overall, the MCP-based chatbot highlights the potential to streamline AI app development and interaction with data sources.