Syra: Building an AI Assistant Into a Tool Platform
Syra started as a simple chatbot. It became something I genuinely use myself when I'm working on the platform.
I added Syra because I kept answering the same questions over and over. "How do I merge PDFs?" "What's the file size limit?" "Can I convert a HEIC file?" Same questions, different users, every day.
The first version was a rule-based bot. I hardcoded answers to the 50 most common questions. It was fast, predictable, and completely useless for anything outside those 50 questions. Users would ask reasonable questions and Syra would confidently give them wrong answers because she was pattern-matching, not understanding.
Version two integrated with a proper language model. Suddenly Syra could understand context, handle follow-up questions, and give answers that actually matched what the user was asking. But now she sometimes said things with confidence that were just... made up.
The current version has guardrails. She knows what she knows about Deecliq tools, and for anything outside that domain, she's honest about her limitations. She can also help users while they're mid-task — "I'm trying to compress a PDF but the output quality is too low" — and give contextually relevant suggestions.
The voice command feature was added almost as a joke: "wouldn't it be funny if you could just say 'hey Syra' and ask a question?" It turns out people actually use it. A lot.