BetaNew
The Playlab Assistant is a collaborative tool that connects your apps, curriculum standards, and classroom materials in one place for thinking and planning. You can use it to design, build, and test apps.
It is not the Co-Builder panel inside a single app. It is its own environment, and it can reach across every app you have access to — which is what lets it do things a single-app helper cannot, like building a new app from an idea or role-playing a student to see how an existing app responds.
You’ll find it at the top of the left sidebar, marked Beta.
Who can use it
Three things have to be true. If the Assistant isn’t in your sidebar, one of them is missing.
The permission counts wherever you hold it. The Assistant is not scoped to one organization, so if you are an Editor or above in any of your organizations, you have access.
Starting a session
1
Open the Assistant
Click Assistant at the top of the left sidebar. It opens to a start screen that greets you by first name — Where should we start, [your name]? — with a chat box and a short list of starter prompts below it.
2
Pick a starting point, or just type
Below the chat box are four starter prompts — Ask what the assistant can do, Build something new, Explore your builds, and Improve your builds. Each one opens a session already pointed at that kind of work.You can ignore them and type your own message instead. The starting points are shortcuts, not modes; a session can go anywhere from wherever it began.
3
Work in the session
Ask a question, describe an idea, or name an app you want to look at. The Assistant can search the apps you have access to, read their instructions, and act on them.A session holds its full context as you go, so you can refine across many turns rather than restating what you want each time.
4
Come back to it later
Sessions are saved. Show previous chats lists them, most recently active first, so you can reopen a line of work instead of starting over. To clear out one you’re finished with, open its ⋮ menu and choose Delete, then confirm. It’s removed from your list.Assistant sessions are only here. History in the left sidebar lists your sessions with published apps, not your Assistant chats.
What you can do with it
Turn an idea into an app
Develop an instructional idea in conversation, then have the Assistant build a working Playlab app from it.1
Describe what you want the app to do
Talk through the idea the way you would with a colleague: who it’s for, what it should help them do, what it should avoid doing. The Assistant will ask about the parts you haven’t specified.
2
Say which organization it belongs in
If you can build in more than one organization, the Assistant will ask which one the new app should live in. It only offers organizations where you can create apps.
3
Open it and keep going
The Assistant creates the app and hands you its details. From there it behaves like any app you built yourself — open it in the builder, edit its instructions, share it, publish it.
Stress-test an app before students use it
The Assistant can role-play a student and hold a full conversation with one of your apps, so you can see how the app behaves before a class does. This is the fastest way to find out whether an app’s tone, guardrails, and instructional goals hold up under a realistic student — including the difficult ones.1
Name the app and the student
Ask the Assistant to simulate a conversation with the app, and describe the persona in specifics: background, knowledge level, how they communicate, what mood they’re in. “A shy 7th grader who struggles with fractions and gives up quickly when confused” produces a far more useful test than “a student.”
2
Say what you're testing for
Give the simulation a goal, which is how it knows when it’s done. A goal can be success — “the student correctly solves a fraction addition problem” — or it can be a pressure test: “the user gets frustrated and the app de-escalates successfully.”
3
Read the transcript
The Assistant runs the conversation turn by turn against the app’s real instructions and shows you the whole exchange. Nothing is saved to the app’s activity, and no student data is involved — the simulation runs entirely in memory.
4
Fix what you found, then run it again
Adjust the app’s instructions and re-run the same persona and goal. Because the test is repeatable, you can tell whether a change actually fixed the behavior.
You can simulate any app you have review access to — your own, plus any others where your organization or space role lets you review activity.
Align apps with curriculum and standards
The Assistant can reach official standards and high-quality open curricula directly, so alignment work happens in the same place as the building.
Ask for what you need in plain language — the standard a lesson should hit, the curriculum unit a task belongs to, a released question to model an exercise on — and the Assistant will pull it and work from it. You can go from a standard to an app grounded in it without leaving the session.
For the underlying tools and how to use them in your own apps, see State standards knowledge graph tool and Illustrative Mathematics knowledge graph.
Edit, analyze, and export your work
A session is a place to produce things, not only to chat about them.- Refine in the editor. Prompts, lesson plans, and rubrics can be drafted and revised in the collaborative editor rather than buried in chat history. See Document editor.
- Analyze with Python. The Python tool runs real code, so the Assistant can work through data and produce charts and graphs. See Python tool.
- Export what you made. Finished documents and spreadsheets go out to Google Drive. See Exporting to Google Drive.
What the Assistant remembers
Two different kinds of memory apply, and it helps to know which is which.
Assistant Notes are durable notes the Assistant keeps about you — ongoing goals, how you prefer it to help, constraints that keep recurring in your work. They follow you from session to session, which is why you don’t have to re-explain your context every time you come back.
You can read and clear them yourself. They live on your user profile under Playlab Assistant Notes.
Your user profile is a separate thing, and it is yours to write: your role, the subjects and grades you teach, accessibility needs, language preferences. The profile is shared across every Playlab app, not just the Assistant. If something is fundamental to how you want Playlab to work everywhere, put it there rather than leaving it to Assistant Notes.
Safety and moderation
The Assistant uses the same moderation system as Playlab apps. Sessions are subject to the same safety checks, and flags route to your responsible organization exactly as they do elsewhere. See Approach to trust and safety.Questions
How is this different from Co-Builder?
How is this different from Co-Builder?
Co-Builder helps you with the one app you have open. The Playlab Assistant is its own environment and works across every app you have access to, which is what lets it create new apps, compare existing ones, and run simulated conversations against them.
Does it remember what we talked about last time?
Does it remember what we talked about last time?
Yes, in two ways. Each session keeps its own full history and can be reopened from Show previous chats. Separately, Assistant Notes carry durable facts about how you work across all of your sessions.
Can students use the Assistant?
Can students use the Assistant?
No. It requires app-building permissions, so it is available to Editors, Builders, and Owners in an organization. Students and space-only members don’t see it.
Do simulated conversations show up in my app's activity?
Do simulated conversations show up in my app's activity?
No. Simulations run in memory against the app’s instructions and are never written to the app’s activity or session data. They don’t affect your insights or exports.
Can I use it on my phone?
Can I use it on my phone?
Yes. The Assistant works on mobile, with its navigation collapsed into a menu.
Related
- Responsible organization — required for Assistant access, and where safety flags go
- Co-Builder — the other assistant, inside the app builder
- Creating a Playlab app — building by hand, once the Assistant has made you one
- State standards knowledge graph tool
- Python tool
- Document editor
Last updated: 10-05-2026 Contact us at [email protected]