Getting Started with OpenAssistant

Prefer a video tutorial? View our Get Started Video Tutorial

Working with your assistant begins with your onboarding. Onboarding will set up all the basic information you need to get started. This guide will walk through the onboarding and getting set up.

Your setup begins by authenticating with your preferred identity provider. Continue and click Get Started.

Confirm you name, location, timezone and language. You can also enter basic information about yourself (i.e. "I'm the founder of Skej") so your assistant has context about who you are.

Confirm the permissions you will grant to your OpenAssistant. At a minimum, we require calendar permissions. This allows the assistant to view your calendar events, modify them, and create new events on the calendar.

Contacts permissions allows the assistant to view your contacts. When you ask the assistant to set up a meeting with a contact, it can find their contact information to coordinate.

Inbox permissions allow the assistant to view all emails in your inbox. If you want the assistant to help with inbox cleanup, drafting emails, reviewing conversations, etc. then this should be enabled.

Drive permissions (Google only) allows the assistant to create, view and save documents to your Google drive account, as well as access Google Meet meeting notes.

See detailed info about assistant: Assistants

You can choose any system assistant, which have been created by the OpenAssistant team. These system assistants have a fixed personality, avatar, email address, and email signature.

Alternatively, you can create your own assistant with any name, avatar, email signature, and personality. We will automatically generate your assistant, avatar, with a Skej-hosted email address. You can also host this assistant at an email at your company's domain.

See detailed info about scheduling preferences: Scheduling Preferences

Set basic scheduling preferences such as recurring work hours, buffers, as well as natural-language instructions for your assistant to remember when scheduling.

There are three main ways to interact with your assistant, whether for scheduling or for any other task.

Cc your assistant on any email, or a thread with others, to assist with scheduling coordination or to give it a task.

You can send a one-off email with a task like, "Remind me to follow up with Alyx tomorrow at 9am", or something like "I'm meeting with John Ryan at 3pm, can you send me some background information on him."

You can DM your assistant over text, WhatsApp or Slack with your request. The assistant will take action from there, and move the request to email if required, or respond back directly with an answer.

In the Skej dashboard, you can assign tasks to your assistant. This can be a scheduling task, calendar query, research, reminders, or workflows.

See more details and examples of tasks here: One-off tasks and Recurring Workflows.

If you're still in the onboarding following along, click Start First Task. This will pre-populate a sample task that you can try out, which is "Send me an email that says 'Hello'.

All tasks, no matter where the originate, will appear in your dashboard in the 'In-progress' view. You can view the status of the task, the latest actions, and what's been completed.

One of the major benefits of using an OpenAssistant assistant, is that it can communicate with others on your behalf. This is necessary for scheduling coordination, but can be used with a variety of tasks.

If you start a scheduling task for instance, the assistant will identify the contact, and email them on your behalf to start scheduling. Remember, this type of task can also be initiated over email, which may be more natural for scheduling.

If you view the task itself, you can see the status of the task, the plan the assistant has created, and action items completed.

See more on integrations: Integrations

Review our Connections and Integrations to connect to other platforms you may already be using. Once connected, your assistant can use those tools for tasks and workflows.

See more on Instructions: Instructions

Teach your assistant all about how you like to work with natural language instructions and memories.

You can create general knowledge preferences, which may just be about how you like to work.

You can also create task specific instructions. For instance, specific instructions for scheduling, for research, contacts, or follow-up related tasks.

See more on Supervision: Supervision & Autonomy

In the Supervision and Autonomy settings, you can determine how autonomous your assistant should be. These granular settings give you complete control on how autonomous your assistant should be.

Fully autonomous lets the assistant take actions on its own.

Semi-autonomous gives you a window of time to confirm an action, to make corrections or stop something before going out.

Manual ensures the assistant checks with you every time before taking an action.

Over time you can always update your settings in the dashboard to match your needs.

You also can teach your assistant by talking with it directly. In a task, or over chat, you can give feedback and instructions, which the assistant will save and remember for the future.

If you have any questions, feedback, or comments, please reach out to [email protected]!