elvex Assistants are chatbots programmed to accomplish specific tasks when receiving a prompt. This article explains how to create assistants, their benefits, and how to use them in the elvex platform.
How Assistants Can Help
Increase efficiency for repetitive tasks
Automatically include specific guidelines or instructions
Serve as instant experts on various topics when connected to Datasources
Creating a New Assistant
Creating an assistant requires only a few steps:
From the Assistants page in elvex, click Create new assistant at the top right of the screen
Complete the assistant settings described in the following sections.
Click Save and Publish when finished
Tip: Use the "magic helper" button 
to the top right of each field for AI-powered suggestions. You can always edit and customize these suggestions.
Assistant Settings
Overview
Name: A short, descriptive name displayed on the assistants page
Tags: Associate tags for easy discovery (Company Admins can manage available tags)
Description: Explain the assistant's purpose, goals, and capabilities
Rules: Define constraints for the assistant's behavior
Context & Datasources
Context and Datasources help ground your assistant and help to prevent hallucinations. This is where we will provide the facts that it needs to keep in mind and connect datasources it can reference.
Context: Add domain-specific knowledge or information (e.g., company acronyms, internal jargon, product names)
Datasources: Connect relevant datasources for enhanced intelligence
For more information on Datasources, refer to our Datasources article.
Conversation Introduction
Welcome Message: Set the initial message users see (default: "How can I help you right now?"). Use this to help frame the conversation for users who are new to your assistant.
Example Tasks: Provide sample questions or tasks to guide users
Security & Permissions
Filters: Set up data redaction for sensitive information
Redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Redact financial information
Visibility: Choose between Private (limited access) or Public (company-wide access)
Permissions: Assign Viewer or Editor roles to users
For more information on roles and permissions, see the Roles and permissions article.
Advanced
These settings should only be changed if you are familiar with the AI provider's documentation and have a good understanding of the AI model's capabilities and limitations.
Instruction Template: Instructions use Jinja's template syntax and we validate your template is valid before saving. You can use the following variables in the template:
{{ name }}
{{ description }}
{{ context }}
{{ rules }}
Provider & Model: Select the AI Provider (Open AI, Anthropic, Cohere, or others that are enabled for your account) and Model (ChatGPT 4, Claude 3 Opus, etc.) that the assistant will use.
Try It
As you build your assistant, you can click "Try it" to test a chat message without leaving the assistant creation screen. The assistant will respond using the settings you currently have configured. This is a good way to quickly test whether the settings will provide the responses you're expecting. If not, you can adjust the settings and try again. You may also want to test different AI Providers and Models to see how the quality of response changes along with each model's capabilities.
Editing Assistants
Assistant owners and users with Editor roles can edit assistants.
elvex tracks changes to assistants over time and will note which version of the assistant is currently in use. If you edit an existing assistant, elvex will automatically note which number version of the assistant is currently in use. You will see the version of the assistant in the chat interface and the Log.
Remember that when an assistant is edited, all users, including any use cases where the assistant is being used via the elvex API, will be forced onto the most recent version of the assistant.
Starting a New Conversation
There are two primary ways to start a conversation with an assistant.
From the Assistants Screen
Find the assistant you want to use and click the "message" icon. When the chat window appears, start chatting! If you clicked the wrong assistant, you can click the correct assistant before you begin your chat.
From the Playground
The Playground is where you can view prior conversations or chats you've had with any elvex Assistant. To start a new conversation from here, click the "Start a new chat" icon. When the chat window appears, start chatting! If you clicked the wrong assistant, you can click the correct assistant before you begin your chat.
Also from the Playground, you may want to continue chatting in a prior conversation. In this case, when you click the conversation you'd like to reopen, you'll be brought straight to that conversation. This allows you to use the historical context of the conversation in your upcoming continuation of the conversation. Meaning, you can ask for clarification on a prior response, provide more information, reference back to data that's already been provided in the chat, etc.
Contact Us!
If you still have questions or need help, please reach out to us at [email protected].