In Dust, you can create your team of specialized assistants to help you on your day-to-day tasks. Each assistant have specific instructions and access to specialized tools that take their capabilities to the next level.

Let's discover how they work !

Overview

• Instructions: Command or guideline you provide to your assistant to direct its responses.
• Tools: tools that your assistant can use to answer - such as searching in your Data Sources or navigating the Web. Before replying, the assistant will decide which tools to use (one or many) to provide you with the best possible answer.

Build your first assistant

Step 1: Create an assistant

Click "Create an Assistant" from the home page. You can start a new assistant or start from a template. In this example, we'll start a new assistant.

Step 2: Give it instructions

Instructions tell your assistant how to behave. How to write effective Instructions

Together, we'll create an custom assistant that can reply to the employee's questions using the internal documentation.

Replace the [X] with your the information that fits your situation. Note: you can follow the tips at the bottom to improve the assistant's output. In this example, we'll make it an HR assistant that answer questions regarding HR company policies.

Note: you can change the model the assistant uses.

Step 3: Give it tools

Tools give your assistant special abilities. In this case, we'll use generic search tool.

This tool will give the ability to the assistant to search through your documentation to find the most relevant documents and to use them as context to generate the answer.

Learn more about tools & capabilities

For this example, do the following:

• Pick the right tool: search
• Select the right data sources: in this case, I selected a HR documentation in Notion and some folders in Gdrive.
• Add a small description of the data source: it will help the assistant understand when to use the tool

Step 4: Test your assistant

You can test your assistant at any time. Assistants will usually require some iterations on the instructions or the tools to get to where you want it to be. It's ok ☀️

To open the preview mode, click on the discussion icon on the right.

Step 5: Give it a name, a description and share it with your team

Step 6: use your assistant

1. In the dust web app: Simple call your assistant be beginning your message with@YOUR_ASSISTANT_NAME in the Dust web app to use it.
2. In Slack:
   1. Call you assistant from Slack with @dust +YOUR_ASSISTANT_NAMEbefore your message.
   2. Link your assistant to a Slack channel. Everytime @dust is called in the Slack channel, your assistant will answer (instead of the generic @dust assistant)
3. In Zapier: Using your assistant in Zapier

Best practices

The three rules to create great assistants

• 1️⃣ The more data you give access to an assistant, the lower the chance of retrieving the correct information.
• 2️⃣ You can "chain" assistant to complete more complex tasks.
• 3️⃣ Invest some time in your assistant's instructions: test different prompts and models and keep iterating. Good instructions make a the difference between poor and great results.

(doc:best-practices) **

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Good to know

• Unsure how to use write best instructions, or what model to pick? Check-out our Best practices
• Unsure what to use Dust for, or how to build it? Check-out our Use Cases & Guides