> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://learn.playlab.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Playlab Assistant

> A single workspace for designing, building, and testing Playlab apps, connected to your apps, curriculum standards, and classroom materials.

<div className="pl-badges">
  <span className="pl-badge pl-badge--neutral">Beta</span>
  <span className="pl-badge pl-badge--new">New</span>
</div>

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 [Builder Assistant](/getstarted/Builder%20Assistant) panel inside a single app. It is its own workspace, 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**.

<Frame>
  <img src="https://mintcdn.com/playlabai/ZDOvRVtDl2GTRIs2/images/assistant-view.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=ZDOvRVtDl2GTRIs2&q=85&s=be866d58fa3ec7c406e1b953102b9cde" alt="The Playlab Assistant start screen, with the Assistant marked Beta at the top of the left sidebar and four suggested ways to begin a session" width="2974" height="1718" data-path="images/assistant-view.png" />
</Frame>

## Who can use it

<Note>
  Three things have to be true. If the Assistant isn't in your sidebar, one of them is missing.
</Note>

| Requirement                   | What it means                                                                                                                                                           |
| ----------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| App-building permissions      | You hold an **Editor** or **Admin** role in at least one organization. Workspace-only and Viewer roles do not include the Assistant.                                    |
| A responsible organization    | Your account has an organization accountable for your usage. Playlab assigns this automatically — see [Responsible organization](/features/Responsible%20Organization). |
| The Assistant enabled for you | The Assistant is rolling out to organizations in stages during Beta.                                                                                                    |

The permission counts wherever you hold it. The Assistant is not scoped to one organization, so if you are an Editor in any of your organizations, you have access.

## Starting a session

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open the Assistant">
    Click **Assistant** at the top of the left sidebar. It opens to a start screen asking where you'd like to begin.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Pick a starting point, or just type">
    The start screen offers four ways in — **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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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. You can archive the ones you're finished with to keep the list clean.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## 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.

<Steps>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Tip>
  Versions the Assistant writes are marked as Assistant-generated in the app's prompt history, so you can always tell which changes came from a session and which you made by hand.
</Tip>

### 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.

<Steps>
  <Step title="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."*
  </Step>

  <Step title="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."*
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Note>
  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.
</Note>

### 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.

| Source                        | What's available                                                        |
| ----------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| State standards               | Math, ELA, and Science, including Common Core, NGSS, and WIDA           |
| Open curricula                | Illustrative Mathematics 360, OpenSciEd, Bookworms, and the OER Project |
| Released assessment questions | Texas, New York, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.                         |

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](/features/MCP%20Standards) and [Illustrative Mathematics knowledge graph](/features/MCP%20IMKG).

### 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 [Doc editor](/features/Doc%20Editor).
* **Analyze with Python.** The Python tool runs real code, so the Assistant can work through data and produce charts and graphs. See [Python tool](/features/MCP%20Python%20Tool).
* **Export what you made.** Finished documents and spreadsheets go out to Google Drive. See [Exporting to Google Drive](/features/Exporting%20to%20Google%20Drive).

## What the Assistant remembers

Two different kinds of memory apply, and it helps to know which is which.

|                     | Scope                   | Who writes it                            |
| ------------------- | ----------------------- | ---------------------------------------- |
| **Session context** | One session             | Built as you work                        |
| **Assistant Notes** | Every Assistant session | The Assistant, as it learns how you work |

**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**.

<Note>
  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.
</Note>

## 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](/faq/Approach%20to%20Trust%20and%20Safety).

<Warning>
  **Known limitation during Beta.** Moderation is currently tuned for student-facing apps, and it can occasionally interrupt legitimate Assistant work — a builder discussing a sensitive curriculum topic, for example. We are tuning moderation specifically for the Assistant based on what we learn during Beta. If this blocks you, tell us at [support@playlab.ai](mailto:support@playlab.ai); the examples are what make the tuning better.
</Warning>

## Questions

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="How is this different from the Builder Assistant?">
    The [Builder Assistant](/getstarted/Builder%20Assistant) helps you with the one app you have open. The Playlab Assistant is its own workspace 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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can students use the Assistant?">
    No. It requires app-building permissions, so it is available to Editors and Admins in an organization. Students and workspace-only members don't see it.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I use it on my phone?">
    Yes. The Assistant works on mobile, with its navigation collapsed into a menu.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Why don't I see the Assistant in my navigation bar?">
    One of the three requirements above isn't met — most often either your role doesn't include app-building permissions, or the Assistant hasn't been enabled for your organization yet during Beta. Your organization admin can confirm your role; for rollout timing, contact [support@playlab.ai](mailto:support@playlab.ai).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Related

* [Responsible organization](/features/Responsible%20Organization) — required for Assistant access, and where safety flags go
* [Builder Assistant](/getstarted/Builder%20Assistant) — the other assistant, inside the app builder
* [Creating a Playlab app](/getstarted/Creating%20a%20Playlab%20App) — building by hand, once the Assistant has made you one
* [State standards knowledge graph tool](/features/MCP%20Standards)
* [Python tool](/features/MCP%20Python%20Tool)
* [Doc editor](/features/Doc%20Editor)

***

Last updated: 09-22-2026
Contact us at [support@playlab.ai](mailto:support@playlab.ai)