Instructions overview

Instructions are the foundational context, rules, and behavioral guidelines that shape how Opal creates output and tailors it to your organization's unique needs. A simple form of instructions could have your company's brand guidelines, ensuring Opal generates on-brand content. Other common instructions include details about your company's products and services, target personas, user journey funnel, term-bases, and so on.

A key differentiator for Opal is its ability to dynamically pull and apply these instructions based on their When to Use criteria. This ensures Opal always applies the most relevant and intelligently tailored guidelines, letting Opal adapt its responses and actions precisely to the current context and your specific requirements.

For a visual walkthrough of instructions, watch the video overview. 

Components of an instruction

Each instruction contains the following components:

1. Name – Serves as a short, descriptive identifier for the instruction, aiding in easy recognition.
2. Active Status – Indicates if the instruction is active in Opal and operational.
3. Core Instructions – Outlines the instruction's behavior, including objectives, response formats, and any constraints. See Core instruction for information.
4. Where to Use – Specifies the Optimizely product and instance contexts where the instruction applies. If you do not set a Product and Instance, the instruction applies to all products. 
5. When to Use – Defines the triggers or conditions when Opal should use the instruction. See When to use for information.

Instructions

Opal administrators can create, update, and delete organization-wide instructions. For comprehensive information on administrator functions, see Get started with Optimizely Opal for administrators. 

You can use instructions to guide Opal when working on any type of content or task. Common instructions include the following:

• Generating long-form content such as articles or blog posts – State how many words articles should have and their paragraph structure.
• Generating campaign and task briefs – Define the formatting, structure, and headings that Opal should use for every campaign and task brief.
• Creating social posts – Set different strategies for different social media platforms.
• Translating content – Configure the language that Opal gives content and responds in.
• Conducting research –  Denote how Opal displays research results with a defined structure and headings.

Prebuilt instructions

Optimizely provides prebuilt instructions in your Opal instance. You can use them immediately or update them to meet your organization's requirements. These instructions serve as a foundation to accelerate your implementation. 

Prebuilt instructions are turned off by default. You can turn them on by toggling Active to on. See the Activate the INSTRUCTION_NAME section in the following documentation:

• Campaign brief – Guides the creation of a comprehensive marketing campaign brief, detailing its purpose, objectives, target audience, key messages, deliverables, channels, and measurement strategies.
• Industry marketer – Adapts existing content from a given URL to a specified industry, customizing it with relevant terminology and examples.
• Keyword-Research – Generates an expert-level keyword research report using the Idealab Opal tools, providing insights into search volume, Cost Per Click (CPC), related keywords, and common questions to inform your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
• Marketing planning meeting – Helps organize and facilitate marketing planning meetings by generating agendas, summarizing key discussion points, and outlining action items.
• Marketing researcher – Conducts in-depth research on a topic you specify providing comprehensive reports and marketing strategy suggestions.
• Personalization advisor – Helps you uncover, design, and measure high-value personalization opportunities.
• Task brief – Generates a structured and actionable brief for a specific task or deliverable, ensuring it aligns with your overall campaign goals, audience, and requirements.
• Tone of voice (sample) – Provides a comprehensive guide to maintaining a consistent brand voice across all content, focusing on professionalism, positivity, insightfulness, and approachability.
• Video transcription – Transcribes audio from a video, offering plain text or .srt formats and removing filler words.

Custom instructions

You can create custom instructions directly within your Opal instance, letting you tailor them precisely to your organization's unique workflows and specific requirements. Crafting these instructions from scratch provides granular control, letting you address distinct challenges and optimize for your exact needs. See Create an organization-wide instruction for steps.

Instruction samples

Not sure how to start writing instructions? The following sample instructions provide ready-made examples you can copy, customize, and use to create your own instructions. See the following samples:

• Sample boilerplate press release
• Sample competitor instruction
• Sample persona instruction
• Sample products and services instruction
• Sample tracked keyword instruction

How Opal selects which instructions to use

When you send a message, Opal decides which instructions are relevant before it generates a response. The following is what happens behind the scenes:

1. Opal gathers all active instructions – Opal collects all instructions available to you and filters out any that are deactivated.
2. Opal matches tool-based instructions first – If an instruction's When to Use field references specific tools (for example, Tools: [generate_image]), Opal automatically selects it whenever those tools are available. Opal requires no further evaluation.

3. Opal evaluates remaining instructions for relevance – An AI model evaluates all non-tool instructions by reading the following:

   • Your latest message.
   • The conversation history.
   • The When to Use field of each instruction.

   The model then decides which instructions are relevant to your conversation. See the following How the relevancy model works section for information.

4. Opal injects matched instructions into context – Opal adds selected instructions to the system prompt so it can follow them when generating a response

Opal uses only the When to Use section to decide whether an instruction is relevant. Opal does not consider the instruction's title and body content during selection and includes them only after selecting an instruction.

How the relevancy model works

The AI model that evaluates instruction relevancy is designed to be inclusive rather than exclusive. The model includes a potentially relevant instruction rather than risk missing one that matters. This means the following:

• Broad or generic When to Use descriptions match frequently. If your purpose is vague, the
  model errs on the side of including it. See When to use for best practices and examples.
• The model makes semantic connections. The model understands that "email subject for a sale" is
  conceptually related to "marketing promotion," even if those exact words do not display in your
  prompt.
• There is no scoring or ranking. Opal either selects each instruction or does not. There is no "70% match" partial inclusion.

This inclusive behavior is intentional. Missing a relevant instruction is worse than including an extra
one. Write your When to Use section carefully to avoid unwanted activations. See When to use for best practices and examples.