Roles and content blocks
Each message has two components:- Role — Specifies who is speaking in the conversation.
- Content block — Contains the actual text, images, or other content.

| Role | Purpose |
|---|---|
| System | Sets the overall instructions, context, and behavioral guidelines for the model. |
| User | Represents end-user inputs — the questions or requests sent to the model. |
| Assistant | Defines the model’s responses. Use this in multi-shot prompts to demonstrate expected output format. |
| Tool | Contains tool responses to tool calls. Used when building prompts with tool interactions. |
Next steps
Use Text in Prompts
Compose text content with variables, comments, and structured formatting.
Use Images in Prompts
Add image inputs for multi-modal prompts.