List AI Assistants with Python and Flask

Overview

Build a production-ready Flask endpoint that lists all AI Assistants on your Telnyx account using the Telnyx Python SDK. This tutorial covers the client-based initialization pattern, proper serialization of SDK response objects, and comprehensive error handling for a reliable API layer over Telnyx AI Assistants.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or higher.
• A Telnyx account with an active API key from the Telnyx Portal.
• At least one AI Assistant created in your Telnyx account (optional, but useful for verifying results).
• pip (Python package manager).

Step 1: Setup

Install the required dependencies:

pip install telnyx flask python-dotenv

Create a project directory and navigate into it:

mkdir telnyx-list-assistants
cd telnyx-list-assistants

Step 2: Configuration

Create a .env file in your project root to store your API key securely:

TELNYX_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE

Replace YOUR_API_KEY_HERE with your actual API key from the Telnyx Portal. Never commit this file to version control — add .env to your .gitignore.

Step 3: Implementation

Create app.py and initialize the Telnyx client. Define a helper function that fetches assistants and returns a plain list of dictionaries — SDK response objects are not JSON-serializable, so you must extract fields explicitly:

import os
import telnyx
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()

# Initialize client with the new SDK pattern
client = telnyx.Telnyx(api_key=os.getenv("TELNYX_API_KEY"))


def fetch_assistants() -> list[dict]:
    """Retrieve all AI Assistants and return JSON-serializable data."""
    response = client.ai_assistants.list()

    # SDK objects are NOT JSON-serializable — always unpack to plain dicts
    return [
        {
            "id": a.id,
            "name": a.name,
            "model": a.model,
            "enabled_features": a.enabled_features,
            "created_at": a.created_at,
        }
        for a in response.data
    ]

The helper function stays free of exception handling — errors propagate up to the route handler where they belong.

Step 4: Testing

Add the Flask route with error handling that maps each Telnyx exception to the correct HTTP status code:

from flask import Flask, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route("/assistants", methods=["GET"])
def list_assistants():
    """HTTP endpoint to list all AI Assistants."""
    try:
        assistants = fetch_assistants()
        return jsonify({"assistants": assistants, "count": len(assistants)}), 200

    except telnyx.AuthenticationError:
        return jsonify({"error": "Invalid API key"}), 401
    except telnyx.RateLimitError:
        return jsonify({"error": "Rate limit exceeded. Please slow down."}), 429
    except telnyx.APIStatusError as e:
        return jsonify({"error": str(e), "status_code": e.status_code}), e.status_code
    except telnyx.APIConnectionError:
        return jsonify({"error": "Network error connecting to Telnyx"}), 503


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True, port=5000)

Start the server:

python app.py

Test the endpoint using curl:

curl http://localhost:5000/assistants

Expected response:

{
  "assistants": [
    {
      "id": "a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab",
      "name": "Customer Support Bot",
      "model": "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct",
      "enabled_features": ["telephony", "messaging"],
      "created_at": "2026-04-20T14:30:00Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "e5f6a7b8-9012-34cd-ef56-7890abcdef12",
      "name": "Sales Qualifier",
      "model": "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct",
      "enabled_features": ["telephony"],
      "created_at": "2026-04-22T09:15:00Z"
    }
  ],
  "count": 2
}

If you have no assistants yet, the response will return an empty list with "count": 0.

Complete Code

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Production-ready Flask endpoint for listing Telnyx AI Assistants."""

import os
import telnyx
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from flask import Flask, jsonify

load_dotenv()

app = Flask(__name__)

# Initialize client with the new SDK pattern
client = telnyx.Telnyx(api_key=os.getenv("TELNYX_API_KEY"))


def fetch_assistants() -> list[dict]:
    """Retrieve all AI Assistants and return JSON-serializable data."""
    response = client.ai_assistants.list()

    # SDK objects are NOT JSON-serializable — always unpack to plain dicts
    return [
        {
            "id": a.id,
            "name": a.name,
            "model": a.model,
            "enabled_features": a.enabled_features,
            "created_at": a.created_at,
        }
        for a in response.data
    ]


@app.route("/assistants", methods=["GET"])
def list_assistants():
    """HTTP endpoint to list all AI Assistants."""
    try:
        assistants = fetch_assistants()
        return jsonify({"assistants": assistants, "count": len(assistants)}), 200

    except telnyx.AuthenticationError:
        return jsonify({"error": "Invalid API key"}), 401
    except telnyx.RateLimitError:
        return jsonify({"error": "Rate limit exceeded. Please slow down."}), 429
    except telnyx.APIStatusError as e:
        return jsonify({"error": str(e), "status_code": e.status_code}), e.status_code
    except telnyx.APIConnectionError:
        return jsonify({"error": "Network error connecting to Telnyx"}), 503


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True, port=5000)

Troubleshooting

Next Steps

• Get an AI Assistant.
• Create an AI Assistant.
• Chat with an AI Assistant.