Turning Assistants Into Tools

Introduction

Once you get a proper grasp of assistants (start with the  Working With Assistants page to do so), you may consider to take the next step into assistant reuse and start turning your assistants into tools. This powerful feature opens a whole world of possibilities by letting you use your refined, specialized & focused assistants in other chats or assistants.

For example, you may have an assistant which is great for answering medical questions (in whatever way you've configured it by giving it web/data access via tools and/or direct knowhow via instructions). Now, by turning it into a tool, you can make this assistant's medical provess a part of your higher level chats or workflows, perhaps combining it with other assistants or tools for translations, image recognition or whatever else may come to use together with it.

Setup & Usage

To get started, visit the Tools section and click the New Tool button. Then select the Assistant variant of the tool. The tool form will prompt to add tool capabilites which you may do by filling the function name, description and prompt message. You may optionally add parameters and place them in the prompt message if the function should take input.

Once called, instead of calling an actual function (whether MCP or internal depending on the tool type), TaskLift will invoke a chat with the assistant, sending the message filled above and replacing the parameters with values provided by the AI model. Once this chat completes, the answer will be provided back as a tool result to the parent chat or assistant.

Similar to assistant chats coming from shared or embedded assistants (learn more on the  Sharing Assistants and  Embedding Assistants pages respectively), chats triggered by tool calls will be visible under the History option for the given assistant.

Otherwise, working with assistant tools is similar to working with other types of tools, so refer to the  Working With Tools page for more information.