---
title: "Parasail"
description: "Parasail API conversion guide - OpenAI-compatible format, streaming support, tool calling, and parameter handling"
icon: "p"
---

## Overview

Parasail is an **OpenAI-compatible provider** offering high-performance inference. Bifrost delegates to the OpenAI implementation with standard parameter handling. Key characteristics:
- **OpenAI API compatibility** - Identical request/response format
- **Full streaming support** - Server-Sent Events with usage tracking
- **Tool calling** - Complete function definition and execution
- **Parameter filtering** - Removes unsupported OpenAI-specific fields
- **Responses API** - Fallback to Chat Completions

### Supported Operations

| Operation | Non-Streaming | Streaming | Endpoint |
|-----------|---------------|-----------|----------|
| Chat Completions | ✅ | ✅ | `/v1/chat/completions` |
| Responses API | ✅ | ✅ | `/v1/chat/completions` |
| List Models | ✅ | - | `/v1/models` |
| Text Completions | ❌ | ❌ | - |
| Embeddings | ❌ | ❌ | - |
| Image Generation | ❌ | ❌ | - |
| Speech (TTS) | ❌ | ❌ | - |
| Transcriptions (STT) | ❌ | ❌ | - |
| Files | ❌ | ❌ | - |
| Batch | ❌ | ❌ | - |

<Note>
**Unsupported Operations** (❌): Text Completions, Embeddings, Image Generation, Speech, Transcriptions, Files, and Batch are not supported by the upstream Parasail API. These return `UnsupportedOperationError`.
</Note>

---

# 1. Chat Completions

## Request Parameters

Parasail supports all standard OpenAI chat completion parameters. For full parameter reference and behavior, see [OpenAI Chat Completions](/providers/supported-providers/openai#1-chat-completions).

### Filtered Parameters

Removed for Parasail compatibility:
- `prompt_cache_key` - Not supported
- `verbosity` - Anthropic-specific
- `store` - Not supported
- `service_tier` - Not supported

### Reasoning Parameter

Reasoning via standard OpenAI format:

```json
{
  "model": "parasail-llama-33-70b-fp8",
  "messages": [...],
  "reasoning_effort": "high"
}
```

Parasail supports all standard OpenAI message types, tools, responses, and streaming formats. For details on message handling, tool conversion, responses, and streaming, refer to [OpenAI Chat Completions](/providers/supported-providers/openai#1-chat-completions).

---

# 2. Responses API

Converted internally to Chat Completions:

```
ResponsesRequest → ChatRequest → ChatCompletion → ResponsesResponse
```

Same parameter support as Chat Completions.

---

# 3. List Models

Lists available Parasail models with capabilities and context information.

---

## Unsupported Features

| Feature | Reason |
|---------|--------|
| Text Completions | Not offered by Parasail API |
| Embedding | Not offered by Parasail API |
| Image Generation | Not offered by Parasail API |
| Speech/TTS | Not offered by Parasail API |
| Transcription/STT | Not offered by Parasail API |
| Batch Operations | Not offered by Parasail API |
| File Management | Not offered by Parasail API |

---

## Caveats

<Accordion title="Cache Control Stripped">
**Severity**: Medium
**Behavior**: Cache control directives are removed from messages
**Impact**: Prompt caching features don't work
**Code**: Stripped during JSON marshaling
</Accordion>

<Accordion title="Parameter Filtering">
**Severity**: Low
**Behavior**: OpenAI-specific parameters filtered out
**Impact**: prompt_cache_key, verbosity, store removed
**Code**: filterOpenAISpecificParameters
</Accordion>

<Accordion title="User Field Size Limit">
**Severity**: Low
**Behavior**: User field > 64 characters silently dropped
**Impact**: Longer user identifiers are lost
**Code**: SanitizeUserField enforces 64-char max
</Accordion>