Bot skills
Each bot keeps its own skills, reusable procedures it creates, updates and deletes itself and rereads in every thread, routine and group.
A skill is a procedure a bot knows how to follow: how to write your weekly report, how to publish a post, how to check a deployment. Each bot has its own skills, separate from its memory and from the skills shared by every agent on your computer. Another bot never sees them.
Skills work the same way for bots on this computer and bots on Vato Cloud.
The bot manages its own skills
You don't have to write skills yourself. The bot creates one when:
- it finishes a task worth repeating, or
- you teach it how to do something and ask it to remember it, for example "Save how you did this as a skill".
When a skill turns out to be wrong or outdated, the bot updates it. When it's no longer useful, the bot deletes it. Each change shows a line in the chat, for example Skill created · weekly-report, Skill updated or Skill deleted.
The bot can change its skills from the General chat, from any thread, from routine runs and from delegated tasks. In a group, it can read its skills but not change them, because a group also contains other bots' messages.
Skills apply everywhere
On every turn, in every conversation of the bot (General chat, threads, routine runs, groups and delegated tasks), Vato gives the bot its skills:
- the skills that best match the current message, in full, up to about 12 KB,
- then the name and When to use line of the others, which the bot can read in full when it needs them.
A skill created in one thread is used right away in the General chat and in every other thread.
See and edit skills
Skills are in two places:
- Actions → Skills: every skill of the bot, with its name, when to use it and who changed it last (Learned by the bot or Edited by you).
- The Skills section of the Overview panel, on the right of the bot's chat: the first five skills. See all opens Actions → Skills.
Click a skill to open it in the skill editor. The procedure is shown formatted, like a Markdown document: headings, lists, bold text, links and code blocks. The editor also shows when to use the skill, who changed it last and when.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| New skill | Opens the editor on an empty skill: a Name, When to use (one line) and the Procedure in Markdown. |
| Edit skill | Switches the editor to editing: the Markdown source on the left, the formatted Preview on the right, updated as you type. Save (or Ctrl+S / Cmd+S) saves; Cancel goes back to the formatted view. |
| Delete skill | Deletes the skill. The first click turns into Confirm; click it to delete. |
If the bot changes a skill while you are editing it, saving shows This skill was changed elsewhere in the meantime. Your text stays in the form: save again to replace the bot's version with yours, or cancel to keep the bot's.
Names are turned into lowercase words joined by hyphens, for example Weekly Report becomes weekly-report. Two skills of the same bot can't have the same name.
Bots on Vato Cloud
A bot on Vato Cloud creates, updates, deletes and rereads its skills exactly like a bot on this computer, even while your computer is off. On the desktop, Actions → Skills and the Overview panel show its skills and refresh when the bot changes one. The Overview panel lists them only while the machine is awake: it never wakes a sleeping machine, but opening Actions → Skills does.
- Move to Vato Cloud copies the bot's skills to the Vato Cloud machine. If some can't be copied, or the machine hasn't been updated yet, Vato says so and those skills stay on this computer.
- Bring home replaces the skills on this computer with the Vato Cloud copy, including the skills the bot created, changed or deleted there. The cloud copy is deleted only after the skills are saved here.
On a Vato Cloud machine that hasn't been updated yet, Actions → Skills says so: the bot has no skills there until its machine runs the new Vato Connect version.
Turn skills off
Skills follow the bot's Vato skills switch in Actions → Integrations. When it is off, the bot doesn't read or change its skills, and Actions → Skills says so. Your skills are kept and come back when you turn the switch on again.
Limits
- Up to 50 skills per bot.
- Name: up to 64 characters. When to use: up to 300 characters, on one line. Procedure: up to 16 KB.
- Don't store passwords, tokens or API keys in a skill. Use the Vato Vault instead.
- Skills aren't copied when you duplicate or export a bot to a file.
- Skills can't be viewed or edited from the mobile app or vatoide.com yet.
- Deleting a bot permanently deletes its skills.