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Workflow Automation

Query Your Files

Learn how to use Lindy to query your files and get instant answers, whenever you need them.

Let's face it – finding specific information in a sea of documents can be time-consuming and frustrating. But Lindy is here to help!

You can think of the Lindy we'll set up in this guide as your personal document assistant, allowing you to ask questions about your files and get instant, accurate answers back. Whether you need to quickly find a specific clause in a contract or summarize the key points of a research paper, Lindy has got you covered.

We'll start with this Query Your Files Lindy.

Here's what it does:

Responds to your questions via the Lindy app, email, or Slack
Queries a Knowledge Base of your documents, folders, and other files
Provides quick, accurate answers about the content of your files
Helps you retrieve any information you need from your documents

And the best part? This will take less than 5 minutes to set up.

Let's get started!

Add The Lindy To Your Account

Once you have added the Lindy to your account, open the Flow Editor to see how it works.

Customize The Triggers

The first thing you'll need to do is customize the triggers.

The Chat Message Received trigger does not need any customization. This trigger allows you to message Lindy in the Task View of the Lindy app to initiate the workflow.

You can click the back button in the flow editor to access the Task View where your Lindy can be woken up by this Chat Message Received action.

Back in the flow editor, click the Slack Message Retrieved trigger.

This trigger will allow you to initiate the workflow across any Slack channel in your Slack Workspace.

Select which Slack Channels you want this Lindy to listen to via the Channels field. Lindy will not be triggered from any channels that are not selected in this field. To have Lindy listen to all channels, select All.

If you do not want Lindy to wake up from every user message in Slack, select the “Filter events on this trigger” option.

You can add a Filter for your Lindy so you can @mention it on Slack to trigger a response.

In this example, we are going to trigger Lindy by @mentioning the name @QALindy. Now every time a user in our Slack Workspace @mentions @QALindy, Lindy will begin this workflow.

To set up the final trigger, click the Lindy Mail Email Received trigger.

Lindy Mail is an email address dedicated to a given Lindy. It allows your Lindies to be triggered by new emails, or to send emails from the address.

In this workflow, this trigger will allow you to email Lindy (or CC her into an email thread) to invoke an email response regarding your files.

Customize the Lindy Mail email address and copy it to your clipboard for testing purposes.

Set Up Your Knowledge Base

Next, you’ll need to set up your knowledge base.

A knowledge base is a repository of files, docs, websites, and text where Lindy can retrieve information.

Click the Search Knowledge Base step and select the content you want Lindy to index. This will serve as the knowledge base for your Query Your Files Lindy.

We recommend you keep the Query field on “Auto”, which means Lindy will use AI in combination with the context of the workflow to update the search query.

You can learn more about using Knowledge Bases here.

Routing Responses

Because Lindy can be woken up by three different triggers, the Condition step acts as a “response router” and tells Lindy which method to respond to messages with.

Each Condition contains a prompt that instructs Lindy to respond via the same method in which the workflow was triggered. For example, responding in Slack when triggered by a Slack message.

Customize Your Lindy's Behavior

In the final steps of the workflow, you can customize how Lindy responds to your queries.

In the Chat Send Message, Slack Send Message, and Lindy Mail Send Reply actions, you will see a default prompt, instructing Lindy on how to respond to user inquiries.

Default prompt:

Respond to the user's questions using the content you found in the Knowledge Base.

**Be extremely helpful. You are the user's "Second hand man" and must ensure the user has all of the information they need to know about their question.**

**Do your best to answer questions directly and succinctly unless the user requires more information. Use direct quotes if necessary.**

Feel free to modify this prompt to best suit your needs. You can specify particular areas of focus, set a tone for responses, or include any other special instructions.

Test Your Lindy

Now that your Lindy is set up, it's time to test it out!

Try asking a question through each of your configured channels. Here are some example queries:

"What are the key terms in our latest client contract?"
"Summarize the main findings from the Q2 financial report."
"Find any mentions of 'artificial intelligence' in my research papers from last year."

Your Lindy will quickly provide you with the necessary information from your files.

Try from all three channels!

Here’s an example of initiating the workflow with a Chat Message: