Tools Overview

Overview

A language model on its own can only read and write text. On its own, it is like a person sitting alone in an empty room: it can think, reason, and respond, but it cannot actually do anything beyond that room. Tools are what change that. Give the person a phone and they can call someone. Give them a browser and they can research. In BotHound, tools let your bot reach beyond pure text and take real action: searching the web, sending email, and more.

How tools attach to tasks

Tools are attached at the task level, not the bot level. That means two tasks inside the same bot can have different tools, and each task only sees what it needs.

This matters for two reasons:

• Focus. A writing task does not benefit from having access to a search tool. Attaching the search tool only to the research task keeps the writing task on the one thing it is good at.
• Safety. An email task only runs when the bot reaches it in the plan. You decide which stage gets the ability to send email, so the bot does not fire off messages while it is still researching.

Attaching a tool

From the bot’s task canvas, open the task you want and attach tools from the picker. You can attach multiple tools to a single task. You can detach them the same way. Changes apply on the next run of the bot.

The current tool set

BotHound ships with a small, opinionated set of built-in tools. See Built-in Tools for the full reference.

We are actively expanding the tool set. If there is a tool you need that is not listed, let us know.

What tools are not

Tools are not a way to call arbitrary code. They are curated, reviewed capabilities that the bot can invoke through a structured interface. That is the whole point: the bot decides when and how to use them, but the behaviour of each tool is predictable and bounded.