Working with Alto
Alto is the AI orchestrator in the Workbench — a conversation that produces real deliverables, builds canvases, and works from your knowledge.
Alto is the AI partner you talk to in the Workbench — the conversation view that's the front door to AltStudio. It's more than a chatbot: Alto reasons over your knowledge, produces finished deliverables, and coordinates across the platform's surfaces on your behalf.
A conversation that produces work
You describe what you need in plain language. Alto works through the request — asking clarifying questions when it helps — and produces a response. When the output is substantial, like a written document or a slide deck, it opens in a side panel beside the conversation so you can read it while you keep talking.
Because refinement is just more conversation, you don't start over to make changes. Ask Alto to tighten a section, restructure a deck, or shift the tone, and it revises the same output in place.
What Alto can do
- Produce deliverables — documents, slide decks, and research, ready to refine and save.
- Build a canvas — when work has structure, Alto can turn the request into a visual workflow you can run and rerun. See the canvas.
- Work from your knowledge — Alto draws on your uploaded documents, reference files, and brand context so answers reflect your material.
- Call tools — it can search the web and use connected tools as part of working through a request.
- Hand work to an agent — dispatch an agent to carry out a scoped task in the background while you keep working. See inline agents.
- Cite its sources — claims can carry citations back to the knowledge they came from, so you can check the basis for an answer. See citations.
Steering and sessions
Two things shape how a conversation goes:
- Directives — short slash commands that steer a single turn, like asking Alto to plan before it acts or to run a deeper research pass. See directives.
- Skills — packaged, reusable approaches you can invoke mid-conversation so Alto handles a task a consistent way. See using skills.
Each conversation is a session. Start a new session for a fresh line of work, and revisit earlier ones to pick up where you left off.
Be specific about the outcome you want — the format, length, and audience. The more concrete the request, the closer the first result lands.