AI UX: Reliable, resumable token streaming
Blog post from Ably
As AI becomes increasingly integrated into everyday applications, users now expect seamless interactions, where AI responses continue uninterrupted despite technical disruptions such as page reloads or network drops. Reliable and resumable token streaming is essential to meet these expectations, ensuring that AI conversations can pick up exactly where they left off without restarts or lost context. This requires a robust transport layer that maintains persistent streaming connections, buffers the AI's output server-side, and tracks session states across client restarts. However, implementing such a seamless experience poses challenges due to the limitations of traditional web protocols like HTTP, which are not designed for long-lived, continuous streams. The solution lies in infrastructure capable of handling reconnections and delivering ordered, exactly-once messages, transforming the web into a reliable conduit for AI data. By addressing these technical hurdles, platforms like Ably AI Transport aim to provide the necessary infrastructure for developers to deliver continuous, uninterrupted AI experiences across devices and sessions.