LLMR in 5 minutes

1. Install

install.packages("LLMR")                   # CRAN
# remotes::install_github("asanaei/LLMR")  # development version

2. Set an API key

You can hand llm_config() your key directly as a string, but the safer habit is to keep it out of your code and let LLMR read it from an environment variable. For each provider LLMR knows a default variable to look in: it tries <PROVIDER>_API_KEY first, then <PROVIDER>_KEY (upper-cased), so Groq reads GROQ_API_KEY, OpenAI reads OPENAI_API_KEY, and so on. If you set that variable, you never pass a key in code at all.

Put the key in your ~/.Renviron file, one per line:

GROQ_API_KEY=...

The easiest way to open that file is:

usethis::edit_r_environ()

Save it and restart R. You can check that R sees the key without printing it:

nzchar(Sys.getenv("GROQ_API_KEY"))   # TRUE once it is set

If this is FALSE, R cannot see the key yet: check the spelling and that you restarted the session. A missing key shows up as an authentication error on your first call, not before.

3. Your first call

llm_config() selects the model; call_llm() sends one message and returns a response object that prints the text plus a short status line. We use Groq’s open-weight gpt-oss-20b here because it is cheap and available to everyone.

library(LLMR)

cfg <- llm_config("groq", "openai/gpt-oss-20b", temperature = 0.2)

r <- call_llm(cfg, c(system = "Be concise.", user = "Capital of Mongolia?"))
r                 # prints the text and a [model | finish | tokens | t] line
as.character(r)   # just the text
tokens(r)         # token counts as a list

A message is a named character vector; the names are roles (system, user, assistant). A bare string is treated as a single user turn.

4. Apply a model to a data frame

llm_mutate() adds model-generated columns to a tibble. The shorthand puts the new column name and a glue prompt template in one argument; {column} is filled from each row.

library(tibble)

reviews <- tibble(text = c("The food was cold.",
                           "Absolutely loved it!",
                           "It was fine, nothing special."))

reviews |>
  llm_mutate(
    sentiment = "Reply with one word (positive/negative/neutral): {text}",
    .config   = cfg
  )

Alongside the sentiment column you also get diagnostic columns (sentiment_ok, sentiment_finish, sentiment_sent, sentiment_rec, …) so you can see what succeeded and how many tokens each row used.

5. Generative calls over a vector

llm_fn() is the lighter-weight sibling of llm_mutate(): give it a vector and a glue prompt where {x} is each element, and it returns a character vector.

countries <- c("Mongolia", "Bolivia", "Chad")

llm_fn(countries,
       prompt  = "Capital city of {x}. Reply with only the city name.",
       .config = cfg)

Switching to a different provider or model is a one-line change to llm_config(); nothing else in your code changes.

6. Tagged fields and row batching

When you want several fields per row, ask the model to wrap each in a named tag and pass .tags; LLMR parses them into columns. Add .batch_size to pack multiple rows into one request (sent as numbered <row_i> blocks and split back apart), which cuts the number of calls and the repeated instruction overhead.

films <- tibble(title = c("Blade Runner", "Amelie", "Parasite", "Spirited Away"))

films |>
  llm_mutate(
    info       = "For the film {title}, give its director and release year.",
    .config    = cfg,
    .tags      = c("director", "year"),
    .batch_size = 2
  )

The four films were resolved in two calls (info_bn = 2). The info_batch, info_bn, and info_bi columns record which call each row landed in and its position within it; the rows always come back in their original order. Prefer modest batch sizes and temperature = 0: batching only pays off when the model reliably follows the wrapping protocol.

7. Embeddings

Embeddings turn text into numeric vectors you can compare. They use a different kind of model, so you make a config with embedding = TRUE; here we use Voyage, which specializes in embeddings (set VOYAGE_API_KEY). get_batched_embeddings() takes a character vector and returns a matrix with one row per text.

emb_cfg <- llm_config("voyage", "voyage-3.5-lite", embedding = TRUE)

texts <- c("I love this restaurant.",
           "The food was delicious.",
           "My car broke down today.")

m <- get_batched_embeddings(texts, emb_cfg)
dim(m)   # 3 texts x embedding dimension

Closeness in this space tracks meaning. Cosine similarity is high for the two sentences about food and low for the unrelated one:

cosine <- function(a, b) sum(a * b) / sqrt(sum(a * a) * sum(b * b))

cosine(m[1, ], m[2, ])   # food vs food: high
cosine(m[1, ], m[3, ])   # food vs car:  low

8. Look before you spend, summarize after

llm_preview() shows exactly what would be sent, with no API call, so you can catch a templating or role mistake before paying for it:

llm_preview(reviews,
            prompt  = "Reply with one word: {text}",
            .config = cfg)

After a run, llm_usage() summarizes token totals and outcomes, and llm_failures() lists any rows that failed or were truncated:

out <- reviews |>
  llm_mutate(sentiment = "One word for: {text}", .config = cfg)

llm_usage(out)
llm_failures(out)

Where to go next

• Tidy pipelines and structured output – llm_fn(), .tags, JSON schemas, and row batching.
• Schema-validated output – enforcing a JSON shape across providers.
• Presidential speech analysis – a fuller embeddings example with clustering.
• Small experiment – factorial designs and parallel execution with call_llm_par().
• Chat sessions – stateful multi-turn conversations.