How to Include Chat History When Using Google Gemini's API

Question

I'm trying to feed chat history to the Google Gemini API using a cURL request. I want to provide both the user's previous input and the model's previous response in the request. Here's the cURL command I'm using:

curl --location 'https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-1.5-flash:generateContent?key=' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
    "contents": [
        {
            "role": "model",
            "parts": [
                {
                    "text": "...model data"
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "role": "user",
            "parts": [
                {
                    "text": "...user input"
                }
            ]
        }
    ],
    "history": [
        {
            "role": "user",
            "parts": [
                {
                    "text": "Hello, I have 2 dogs in my house."
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "role": "model",
            "parts": [
                {
                    "text": "Great to meet you. What would you like to know?"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}'

I'm not sure if I'm formatting the contents and history sections correctly.

I expected the model to understand the previous exchanges and continue the conversation accordingly.

Answer 1

You have to include your chats to the "parts" list to make gemini to remember their chat history.

Example data:

{
    "contents": [
        {
            "parts": [
                {"text": "User: Hello"},
                {"text": "User: What was my previous message?"}
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Response:

{
  "candidates": [
    {
      "content": {
        "parts": [
          {
            "text": "Your previous message was: \"Hello\"\n"
          }
        ],
        "role": "model"
      },
      "finishReason": "STOP",
      "avgLogprobs": -0.08453522125879924
    }
  ],
  "usageMetadata": {
    "promptTokenCount": 11,
    "candidatesTokenCount": 9,
    "totalTokenCount": 20
  },
  "modelVersion": "gemini-1.5-flash"
}

for interactive mode you have to include into contents list to make gemini to remember their chat history.:

Example data:

{
        "contents": [
          {"role":"user",
           "parts":[{
             "text": "Hello"}]},
          {"role": "model",
           "parts":[{
             "text": "Great to meet you. What would you like to know?"}]},
          {"role":"user",
           "parts":[{
             "text": "What was my previous message"}]},
        ]
}

Response:

{
  "candidates": [
    {
      "content": {
        "parts": [
          {
            "text": "Your previous message was \"Hello\".\n"
          }
        ],
        "role": "model"
      },
      "finishReason": "STOP",
      "avgLogprobs": -0.30310314893722534
    }
  ],
  "usageMetadata": {
    "promptTokenCount": 21,
    "candidatesTokenCount": 8,
    "totalTokenCount": 29
  },
  "modelVersion": "gemini-1.5-flash"
}