GroupChat is overly sensitive to formatting when selecting the next speaker.

[afourney]

As pointed out by Jonny7377 on Discord, GroupChat is overly sensitive to formatting issues when selecting the next speaker. E.g.,

GroupChat select_speaker failed to resolve the next speaker's name. Speaker selection will default to the next speaker in the list. This is because the speaker selection OAI call returned:
 Coder

In this case, the extra space causes the lookup to fail.

At the very least, the code should strip() whitespace from the agent names before doing a lookup. That can be done here:

https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/blob/4711260582536e23ebbd9c3ccd067cddf60cd21f/autogen/agentchat/groupchat.py#L42

Or here,

https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/blob/4711260582536e23ebbd9c3ccd067cddf60cd21f/autogen/agentchat/groupchat.py#L90

Alternatively, a more robust option might be to check if exactly one agent is mentioned in response, and if so, select it (regardless of how it is formatted).

[AndreiD]

still have the same issue

[asandez1]

The issue arises when utilizing an open-source language model (LLM), whereas switching to OpenAI resolves the error. "GroupChat select_speaker failed to resolve the next speaker's name"

Change the LLM to the GroupChatManager ,and the agents can continue using the open-source llm

[sonichi]

2304 is an effort to improve this.

[marklysze]

I'm working on #2304 and have included strip() on the return result. I've updated what is in #2304 to use agents for the speaker selection and am testing before checking that back in. This issue will be covered by that work.