What are guidelines?
Guidelines are a way to customize Duckie’s behavior to match your team’s needs. They are a set of rules that Duckie will follow when handling requests. You can access guidelines from theGuidelines
page in the web app here.
Types of guidelines
Guidelines are categorized into three types: General, Case Specific, and Usage Specific.General Guidelines

- Modifying Duckie’s degree of freedom in a conversation
- Changing response length and format
- Adding important information that is relevant to all requests
Creating a general guideline

Description
field. The description will be used throughout Duckie’s response process to help it make decisions and generate responses.
Ducklings: You can select which Ducklings will be affected by the guideline, or leave it blank to apply to all Ducklings.
Case Specific Guidelines

- Dictating how Duckie should handle specific request types (e.g. pricing questions)
- Providing additional context for a specific topic
Creating a case specific guideline

Case
field is used to identify the specific conditions that will trigger the guideline.
Description: The Description
field tells Duckie what to do when the case is triggered.
Ducklings: You can select which Ducklings will be affected by the guideline, or leave it blank to apply to all Ducklings.
Response Feedback

Best Practices
Description
Descriptions should be detailed. Write them as if you are giving instructions to a child. The more information you provide, the better Duckie will be able to follow your instructions.Case
Cases should be as specific as possible. For example, instead of using “Pricing questions” as a case, use “When the user asks about pricing for product X” as a case. For more complex cases, we have found that “checklist” style cases are effective.To learn more about how to create guidelines, reach out to the Duckie team!