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🪄 Set Up Your Assistant

Your AI assistant is the brain that replies to customers on your behalf. You teach it about your business in three ways: a prompt (its personality and rules), files (PDFs, docs), and web imports (your website pages, scraped automatically).

Step 1 — Create the assistant

  1. From the dashboard sidebar, go to Assistants.
  2. Make sure the right organization is selected at the top.
  3. Click Create Assistant.
  4. Fill in:
    • Name — something descriptive (e.g. "Front-desk concierge").
    • Prompt / Instructions — the personality and rules. See below.
  5. Click Create Assistant. You'll see it appear in the list immediately.

Step 2 — Write a good prompt

The prompt is the most important thing you give the assistant. It shapes everything the AI says. A good prompt covers:

  • Role & Core Purpose — who is this AI? (e.g."You are the digital concierge for Heavenly Hotels, Lagos.")
  • Tone & Style — formal, friendly, playful? Use first names? Emojis allowed?
  • What you can help with — bookings, FAQs, menu questions, returns.
  • What you can't — pricing changes, refunds over $X, medical advice. Tell it when to hand off.
  • Brand rules — never say competitor names, always end with our slogan, etc.
  • Handoff trigger — when to escalate to a human (e.g. "If the customer is angry or asks for a human, immediately reply 'I'll connect you with our team' and stop.").
Need a starting point? The Create Assistant dialog has an Example Prompt button — copy that, then edit to fit your business.

Step 3 — Open the assistant's knowledge base

From the Assistants list, click the assistant card you just created. (Or use the ⋮ menu → Manage Files.) You land on the knowledge-base page with four tabs:

  • Upload — add files from your computer.
  • Import from Web — scrape pages from a URL.
  • Files— view, retry, delete what's already there.
  • Stats — quick health view (processing / completed / failed counts).

At the top you'll see a header card with the assistant's name, file count (X / 20), total size, and a preview of the prompt.

Step 4 — Add files to the knowledge base

Open the Upload tab. Drag-and-drop or click to browse.

What you can upload

  • Documents: .pdf, .doc, .docx
  • Slides: .ppt, .pptx
  • Text: .txt, .md, .html, .json
  • Code (if relevant): .py, .ts, .sh, .tex

Limits

  • 20 files per assistant.
  • 512 MB per file.

What happens after upload

  1. File appears with status Pending, then Processing as we extract and index its text.
  2. When indexing finishes, status flips to Completed — the assistant can now answer from it.
  3. If extraction fails (corrupt file, password-protected PDF), status goes to Failed with an error message. Click Retry to try again.
Tip: processing happens in the background. You can leave the page — the file keeps indexing. Come back and click Refresh to see updated statuses.

Step 5 — Import from the web (scrape & crawl)

The Import from Web tab lets you turn your website (or any public site) into knowledge files. Powered by Firecrawl under the hood.

Three modes

Scrape

Pulls one specific page and saves its content as a file. Best for a single FAQ page or a long article.

Map

Lists every URLon a site so you can see what's there before crawling. Useful when you don't know the structure.

Crawl

Walks through a site starting at a URL and pulls multiple pages (you can cap how many). Saves each as its own file. Best for an entire docs site or product catalog.

How to import a page

  1. Pick Scrape.
  2. Paste the URL (e.g. https://yourcompany.com/faq).
  3. Click Import. Firecrawl fetches the page, strips ads and chrome, and stores the cleaned content as a file.
  4. Within a few seconds it appears in the Files tab with status Completed.

How to crawl a site

  1. Pick Crawl.
  2. Paste the starting URL.
  3. Set a limit (e.g. 20 pages). Stay under your 20-file cap.
  4. Optionally restrict to a path (e.g. /docs/*) so you don't pull marketing pages.
  5. Click Start Crawl. Watch the progress bar — each page is added as a separate file.
Crawl politely.If you crawl a site you don't own, respect their robots.txt. Don't set the limit higher than you need — you also have a monthly Firecrawl quota visible in the panel.

Step 6 — Manage existing files

The Files tab is the master list. For each file you see:

  • Status icon — green check (completed), yellow clock (processing), red X (failed).
  • Name, type, size, and upload date.
  • A Deletebutton (trash icon) to remove the file from the assistant's knowledge.
  • For failed files — a Retry button.

Deleting a file

  1. Click the trash icon next to the file.
  2. Confirm.
  3. The file is permanently removed and the assistant immediately stops referencing it.

Refreshing the view

Click the Refresh button at the top right (it shows a circular arrow) to re-fetch status. The page also auto-checks pending files every minute.

Updating the prompt later

The prompt isn't set in stone — you should iterate on it as you see how the assistant behaves in real conversations.

  1. Go to Assistants in the sidebar.
  2. Find your assistant card, click the ⋮ menu, choose Edit. (You can also click the prompt preview to expand it.)
  3. Update the name or prompt text in the form.
  4. Click Save. The change is live immediately — next conversation uses the new prompt.

Iterating on the prompt — a workflow that works

  1. Spot a bad answer in Conversations.
  2. Ask yourself: was it a knowledge gap (add a file) or a behaviour gap (update the prompt)?
  3. For prompt fixes, add a single explicit rule — "If asked about refunds, always say: contact [email protected]."
  4. Save. Re-test the same question from your own number.
  5. Repeat. Small specific rules beat long fluffy ones.
Tip: if your prompt is getting long, break it into sections with headers (### Tone, ### Handoff rules, ### Product info) — the AI follows structured prompts more reliably.

Deleting an assistant

From the Assistants list, click the ⋮ menu on the card, choose Delete, confirm. All files, conversations, and chatbot links to this assistant are detached. This cannot be undone — export the prompt first if you might want it back.

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