What is BotHound?

Overview

BotHound is a platform for building bots that handle the repetitive jobs you used to do by hand. You describe who the bot is, lay out the work as a series of tasks, give those tasks the tools they need to act in the real world, and then either run the bot on demand or schedule it to run on its own.

The four primitives

Every bot in BotHound is made from four building blocks. Understanding them is all you need to start building.

Bot

A bot is the thing that does the work. It has a name and a soul. The soul is a block of text that defines who the bot is and what it is for. Think of it as the bot’s brief: “You are a research assistant who writes concise daily briefings on the AI industry for a busy executive.” The soul sits above every task the bot runs.

Task

A task is one step in the bot’s plan. Tasks are ordered into stages within the bot. Tasks at the same stage run in parallel. Tasks at later stages can read the output of tasks that came before them. A task has a name, a prompt that tells it what to do, and an optional set of tools it can use.

Tool

A tool lets a task reach beyond pure text and take real action. Without tools, a bot can only think. With tools, it can search the web, send email, and more. Tools are attached at the task level, so different tasks in the same bot can have different capabilities.

Schedule

A schedule runs the bot for you. It can be a single future run at a specific time, or a recurring cadence: every morning, every Monday, the first of every month. Schedules pick up where you left off, so you never have to remember to kick the bot off yourself.

How they fit together

A typical bot works like this:

1. You create the bot and write its soul.
2. You add a few tasks that break the work into clear stages.
3. You attach the tools each task needs.
4. You run the bot once manually to confirm the output is what you want.
5. You attach a schedule so the bot keeps running on its own.

From that point on, the bot does the job. You get the output without having to do the work.

What is next

• Quick Start shows you how to build and run your first bot in a few minutes.
• Creating a Bot walks through the fields on a bot and what each one is for.
• Bot Tasks explains how tasks, stages, and dependencies work together.