Puree Help: Ask a Question Without Leaving the Page You're On

There is a particular kind of small question that comes up while you're halfway through building a quote. Where do I hide an item from the customer view? What's the difference between a category and a menu header? How do I stop a package item showing its price? None of these are hard, and all of them have an answer sitting in our help pages. The problem is that going to find it means leaving the page you're on, which is exactly what you don't want to do with a half-finished quote in front of you.

So we've put the help pages inside the app. There's now a small Help button in the bottom right corner of every page. Click it, type your question in plain English, and you get an answer in a few seconds, with links to the help pages it came from.

The Help button sits in the corner of every page. It opens in place, so nothing you're working on is disturbed.

Where Its Answers Come From

This is the part worth understanding, because it's what makes the answers trustworthy. The assistant reads our help pages and our articles. That's it. It isn't answering from general knowledge about catering software, and it isn't making things up about how Puree works. When something isn't covered, it says so and points you at the Feedback button rather than inventing a menu path that doesn't exist.

It also knows which part of Puree you're looking at. Ask "how do options work" from the items page and you'll get item options. Ask the same words from a quote and you'll get a different, more useful answer. And because it reads the help pages directly, the moment we correct or expand a page, the assistant knows it too. There's no separate copy to fall out of date.

Every answer ends with links to the pages it used. If you want the full detail, or you want to check it, the source is one click away.

What to Ask It

Ask it the way you'd ask a colleague. Full sentences work better than keywords, because it's reading your question rather than matching words in it.

• "How do I stop a package item from showing its price on the customer quote?"
• "What's the difference between a category and a menu header?"
• "A customer wants to cancel five days out. What are my options in Puree?"
• "How do I take a deposit through Stripe?"
• "Can I send one invoice for a three day event?"

It follows the conversation, so you can just say "and how do I undo that?" without repeating yourself. New at the top of the panel starts a fresh thread when you move on to something else.

When It Doesn't Know

It will tell you. That's deliberate, and it's the behaviour we care most about: an assistant that guesses confidently is worse than no assistant, because you'd have no way of knowing which answers to trust. If it can't find something in the help pages it says so plainly and sends you to the Feedback button, where a person will pick it up.

Those gaps are useful to us too. We can see the questions being asked, which tells us exactly which help pages we haven't written yet. So a question it can't answer today is a page that gets written, and then it can.

Getting It Switched On

We're enabling it account by account rather than all at once, so we can watch how it does and fix what it gets wrong. If you'd like it on for your team, get in touch and we'll switch it on. If it gives you an answer that's off, please tell us. Every correction we make lands in the help pages, which means it lands in the assistant.