Definition
Streaming RAG is an architectural pattern that delivers incremental LLM response chunks to the end-user in real-time as they are generated, rather than waiting for the complete synthesis of retrieved context into a final answer. This optimizes the Time to First Token (TTFT) by bypassing the linear bottleneck of full-sequence generation in conversational AI agents.
Refers to the incremental delivery of response tokens, not real-time data ingestion into a vector database.
"A digital ticker tape displaying a message character-by-character as it is typed, rather than waiting for a full telegram to be printed and delivered."
- Time to First Token (TTFT)(Primary Performance Metric)
- Server-Sent Events (SSE)(Underlying Communication Protocol)
- Tokenization(Prerequisite)
Conceptual Overview
Streaming RAG is an architectural pattern that delivers incremental LLM response chunks to the end-user in real-time as they are generated, rather than waiting for the complete synthesis of retrieved context into a final answer. This optimizes the Time to First Token (TTFT) by bypassing the linear bottleneck of full-sequence generation in conversational AI agents.
Disambiguation
Refers to the incremental delivery of response tokens, not real-time data ingestion into a vector database.
Visual Analog
A digital ticker tape displaying a message character-by-character as it is typed, rather than waiting for a full telegram to be printed and delivered.