Improving Answers

Step 1: Check your app connections

Make sure you've connected all the applications for Dashworks to search from the App Store, and the correct accounts for each of the applications.

Step 2: Check content permissions within app connections

Please read this section to ensure you're familiar with how search permissions work across surfaces.

Confirm if the app account you've connected to Dashworks has access to the required file, folder, project, channel, or other specific content that you want it to search. This is specially important while using the Slackbot or Bots, since they rely on the permissions of the app connections for the Bot Account. Please review this section for details on how to configure the Bot Account with appropriate search access.

A rule of thumb here is that the bot can only search for information in an app that you can find after logging in to that app using the app connection email.

Here's an example: Say you have connected the Bot Account to a Google Drive account with the email [e-mail]. Now login to the Google Drive web app (drive.google.com) with the same email. Anything you can find in web app will also be searchable in Dashworks, as long as it is one of the supported object types. If you can't find something while logged in to the app itself using the connection email, then Dashworks won't have the permissions to search for it either. The supported object types for each application are listed here.

Step 3: Check if it's a known limitation

Here are some of the known limitations of Dashworks that we're working hard to improve:

1. Questions with search filters: Dashworks doesn't reliably understand search filters yet. For instance, for the question give me any unread emails from John from last month, you'd want Dashworks to use the Gmail search query from:john is:unread older_than:1m. However, Dashworks cannot always apply such filters accurately. Other examples: summarize the last thread from Macy in the #general channel, what's on my calendar for next week?

2. Multi-hop searches: When you're looking for information manually, sometimes you might decide to do a search and then based on what you find in one of the documents of the search results, do another search with a different query. For instance, for the question can you help me resolve support ticket X, you would first search for the ticket X, and then based on the contents of the ticket perform another search to find information related to it. These kinds of two-hop (or more generally, multi-hop) searches aren't supported yet. Dashworks instead runs multiple searches parallelly but in a single hop.

3. Analytical questions: Dashworks cannot reliably perform numerical calculations or analysis on spreadsheets or other data just yet. Example: what was the total revenue closed in North America region in Q2?.

Step 4: Rephrase your question and apply filters

Here are some suggestions for how to improve your questions:

• Include all relevant keywords: Dashworks uses keywords and phrases related to your question when searching in your connected apps. For example, if you ask, what is our refund policy, it will look for terms like refund policy, customer refunds, or billing policy. Adding more relevant keywords to your question increases the likelihood that it will find the correct content.

• Reduce ambiguity: The more specific and well written your question is, the better response Dashworks can provide. Phrase your question as a well-formed sentence instead of simply entering keywords like we're used to in Google. For example, ask, Can you give me a history of the deal with Acme? instead of just querying Acme. As another example, instead of asking something like what's our deck?, make it more specific like can you find me our latest sales deck from 2024?. A helpful analogy here is to think of Dashworks as a new intern who's joined your team. The more context you can provide in your question and clearly specify the task, the better the performance can be.

• Tell Dashworks which app to search: You can include the app name, file name, and file type in your question. These signals help Dashworks focus its search and surface the correct results. For instance, you can ask, Give me a link to the RFC for the slack autoresponder. It's a notion doc I saw in Slack last week.

  You can also specify apps to search from the Apps dropdown in the input box on the web app, or by configuring bots on the Bots page.

• Specify the type of answer in the question: You can ask Dashworks to return links to docs, summarize docs, write emails, write blog posts, and more. For instance, if you ask Dashworks summary of the latest sales deck it will return a summary of the deck, and if you ask it link to the latest sales deck it will return a URL for it instead.

Step 5: Add Instructions

Instructions are the best way to teach Dashworks where to look for specific information, what information to prioritize, and what to ignore. Learn more about adding Instructions here.

If you're still running into an issue after adding instructions, please contact our team from the in-app support chat to help debug it!