# Conversational Multi-Agent

> Two or more agents converse turn by turn, each playing a distinct role, until a completion criterion fires — natural fit for tasks that converge through dialogue.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Multi-Agent
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/autogen_conversational/

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## Description
**Intent**: Have agents converse turn by turn until a completion criterion fires, with agent roles driving the conversation forward.
**Context**: Some tasks naturally shape like dialogue between two or more specialists: a coder and a reviewer revising a patch, a teacher and a student working through an explanation, a writer and an editor. The work converges through back-and-forth rather than a single agent's monologue.
**Solution**: Define agents with system prompts and allowed actions. Implement a conversation manager that selects which agent speaks next (round-robin, condition-based, model-decided). Each agent reads the conversation and emits a turn. Continue until a termination criterion fires (task complete, max turns, explicit handoff to user).



## Use Cases
- The task naturally maps to dialogue between roles (e.g. user-proxy and assistant, planner and executor).
- A conversation manager can pick the next speaker by rule, condition, or model decision.
- Termination criteria (task complete, max turns, explicit handoff) are easy to express.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Natural way to model peer collaboration with clear role definition per agent.

- Each agent has a clean, inspectable role that's easy to reason about in isolation.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Conversation drift is real — agents can gradually lose track of the original goal over many turns.

- Hard to formally verify correctness of the multi-agent flow as a whole.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/conversational-multi-agent/)