How to Use Actions and Workflows

New to actions? Check out our step-by-step guide to creating your first action with screenshots and examples!

We have a ton of pre-built super-useful actions that come preloaded to make your life easier, and give you actions you can then tweak to your own needs, or use out of the box.

You can see some of them here - Action Library

Don’t see what you want? No worries - just click ‘Add Action’ then type the general idea of what you want into the action box - the better you can give, the better you’ll get - and then click ‘Magic Action’.

Out will come a dynamic, amazing action full of all the magic we have in the rest of the actions.

When you’re ready to go further…

You can add your own actions by either selecting ‘add to workflow’ on a particularly good message in chat (either yours or the chatbot’s), and then choosing its name and where it should go, and tweaking it to be more general if you need to.

You can also, once you start to build out workflows, just drag and drop the actions to organize them - in one workflow by default, and if you open up two workflows, you can drag the actions between each workflow, as more complex workflows develop. Just click play to execute the workflow all at once. (You can read more about workflows here)

Then, for the next level up…

Variables!

What does that mean?

It means you can put dynamic content into fixed actions.

So, for example, if you want to make an action that comes up with ad ideas for any brand (let’s say you’re a marketing consultant or something along those lines):

Please come up with ten wild ideas for new ad campaigns for the following brand:

${ Brand Description }

Make sure each idea is completely unique, thought of from a different angle compared to any of the previous ad campaign ideas.

The cool thing about variables, is if you use the same name for your variables in a workflow, that variable will default to the same value during your session, but reset to being blank for the next time you log in.

So if you make another action like:

Please provide 5 new brand descriptions based on the following, each with a unique voice:

${ Brand Description }

You don't have to copy/paste again. This is perfect for workflows where you work on a specific subject, client, or topic and want to do so efficiently and easily.

If you're familiar with code, this is similar syntax to JavaScript Template Literals - I chose that syntax to be comfortable for techie types, easy enough to type, and also while being hard to accidentally trigger in a regular piece of text for non-programmers by mistake.

You can have these variables anywhere in your action, in any number - so if you have a brand name, brand description, website url, and so forth, you can have variables for each like:

Please review the following for congruency and suggest improvements for brand alignment:

${ Brand Name }
${ Brand Description }
${ founder_name }
${URL}
${ target-MARKET }

Let's think step by step.

All of those ways of writing variables are fine - try it out!

How does it work?

Just click an action that has a variable in it, and it will pop up a little dialog box where you can paste in the right content for each variable.

Once you’re done, hit Submit and it will go into your normal chatbox for any further editing, where you can either hit enter to send or change it up a bit first.

If you have any questions about actions, just reach out to team @ brightrobot.ai and we (probably Robert) will get back to you.