Kuumba bots

If you find yourself explaining the same background every time — who your customers are, the tone to write in, the format a report has to follow — put it in a bot instead. A bot remembers all of that, so your question can be short.

Each bot has its own face, so you can tell them apart at a glance in the sidebar and in the $ menu.

Using one

Press $ in the message box and pick a bot, or open Kuumba bots in the sidebar. From that point the conversation is with that bot, and it answers using its own instructions.

Building one

1. Open Kuumba bots in the sidebar and choose to create a new one.

2. Name it for the job, not the technology — “Proposal writer”, not “GPT assistant”. The name is what you will be looking for under $.

3. Write the instructions. This is the briefing you would give a new colleague: what it is for, what it should assume, what it must never do. Plain sentences work better than keywords.

4. Give it what it needs. Attach the files it should always have to hand, and switch on the tools it needs, such as web search.

5. Save, then test it on a real task. Bots get good by being corrected.

Writing instructions that work

• Say what “good” looks like. “Three paragraphs, no bullet points, no preamble” beats “be concise”.
• Name the audience. A bot writing for engineers and a bot writing for clients need different instructions, not a cleverer model.
• Say what to do when it does not know. Without that, models guess. “If the answer is not in the attached documents, say so and stop” is worth including in almost every bot.

Bot or skill?

A bot is a persona you have a conversation with. A skill is one instruction you drop into a single message with /. If you want it every time, it is a bot; if you want it occasionally, it is a skill.

Sharing

Depending on how your administrator has set things up, a bot can be yours alone or shared with your team. A shared bot is the fastest way to make one person’s good prompt everyone’s default.