Building a streaming AI companion in your own API

I am co-founder of libelo, which is a platform for discovering parks and nature highlights. One of the features we are building is a conversational companion: an AI assistant that helps users plan hikes, find species, check trail conditions, and get context about the nature around them. The backend is powered by Azure AI Foundry. This post explains why the mobile app does not talk to Foundry directly, how we structure the response so the app can render rich UI cards alongside the text, and how the streaming connection between client and server works.