Troubleshoot Zapier Central assistants

Beta

This product is in open beta. It’s available for use but still in active development and may change.

If your Zapier Central assistant is not returning the response you expected, you can troubleshoot it to make improvements.

Ask your assistant for help

Your assistant is capable of reviewing its own settings, so before going through the options below, ask your assistant to check itself for any issues with behaviors, actions, or data sources.

Example

You can message your assistant something like this:

"I did not receive my morning Slack DM with a list of meetings this morning. Can you check if there are any issues with the behavior?"

The assistant will then check for any errors and offer suggestions on how to fix them.

Check app connections

Periodically review the app connections the assistant is using to ensure they are working properly. 

You can check if anything needs to be updated by asking your assistant to review all app connections for errors. 

Use the Activity screen to review action fields

Based on your instructions, assistants can fill out both required and optional fields in your actions. If you're having trouble with a specific action, it may be that a field is not being filled out correctly. To check if there are any issues with the fields:

• From your assistant Chat screen, click Activity at the top. You'll be brought to the Activity screen.
• Use the dropdown menus to filter by behavior or status.
• Once you find the action causing problems, click the down arrow icon to examine how the assistant interpreted and carried out the instructions.

If you find the field you need to update, return to the Chat screen to update the action's field.

Test behavior

You can make changes to the behavior or the action to ensure it matches what an app expects. 

Once you make changes to your instructions, test the behavior and review the Activity screen to check how the behavior ran with the updates. You can test a behavior from the Behavior setup, by clicking the Test behavior button.

Add alternative instructions

If you find an issue related to an exception you did not expect, you can add instructions that tell the assistant how to handle exceptions. This way, it will know how to react and can let you know if any issues arise.

Example

Your assistant has the following instructions:

"Get all leads received the day before from Facebook Leads and allocate them evenly between two salespeople. Send each a Slack message with the lead's contact information.”

To avoid uncertainty on days when there are no leads, you can include alternative actions. For example:

"If there are no new leads since the previous day, send a message to both salespeople and to myself in Slack, letting us know nothing new came through.”

Provide feedback and get help

Submit a feature request, provide feedback on existing features, or get help from the Zapier Central team. You can also discuss Central with other users on Zapier's Early Access Program Slack.