Customizing Unblocked’s answers

Dennis Pilarinos

November 19, 2024

Developers use Unblocked to answer a wide range of questions. Some developers prefer short, to-the-point answers, while others prefer longer expositional responses with a lot of technical details.

To accommodate these types of preferences, today we’re letting you customize the ways in which Unblocked gives you answers.

Answer Preferences is a new feature we’ve added that gives you more control over a number of aspects of Unblocked’s answers - from length, to research depth, and more.

Now, when you ask Unblocked a question (whether in the web app, mac app, or IDE extensions) you’ll see a toggle icon in the right-hand side of the question box.

Clicking this icon will open up a preference menu that you can use to set various elements of how you’d like to receive answers from Unblocked.

You have three sets of options to choose from:

Length, which gives Unblocked parameters for how long responses should be and how much detail is included for a given length
Tone, which sets the level of technical detail, including code examples, that Unblocked includes in answers
Depth, which establishes the extent of research Unblocked conducts to provide answers

Each customization option has a default setting alongside options to decrease or increase each of the answer aspects. Each default sets up the most balanced answers across length, tone, and depth, but you can increase or decrease any of these answer components according to your unique preferences.

For example, if you work in product management or customer support, you can set your tone preference to Casual, and Unblocked will not provide code snippets in your responses.

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Casual Answer Tone (left), Technical Answer Tone (right)

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While length and tone are fairly straightforward settings, the ability to customize depth as an answer choice stems off of new engineering work on our part to enable Unblocked to answer questions with a higher degree of ambiguity or missing context, especially in cases where the answer requires multiple retrieval and reasoning steps. When you set your depth preference to Thorough, Unblocked will be able to answer more difficult and nebulous questions, but answer response time may be slightly slower.

For more on how to set your Answer Preferences, see our documentation. This feature is only available to teams using Unblocked on the Business and Enterprise Plans. If you’d like a demo of this feature along with other parts of Unblocked, <a id="chat-with-us" href="#">get in touch with our team.</a>