Chat with your Notion databases

Step 1: Create a Dust account and sync Notion to it

To get started, you’ll need to create a Dust account and sync a top-level Notion page (ideally with a database) to it. Go to Dust and click the Get Started button to create an account.

Once you’ve created your Dust account, navigate to the Build tab and click the Connections option under Data Sources on the left side panel.

This will take you to all of the data feeds Dust can ingest from 3rd party applications, which include Confluence, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and many other sources. For this tutorial, we’ll be connecting Notion to our Dust account.

To do this, click the Connect button next to Notion and follow the prompts to sync specific top-level pages from your Notion Workspace to Dust.

For this tutorial, we’ve synced a Notion database of Ben’s Bites tutorial content to Dust so we can chat with our tutorial content with Dust’s programmable AI assistants.

Step 2: Create a content writer Dust assistant

Now that our Notion database is synced to Dust, we can create our first AI assistant. To do this, click on the Chat tab on the left side panel and select My Assistants.

On the next page, click the Create An Assistant button.

On this page, you can select an existing AI Assistant from a wide array of pre-made templates from the Dust team, ranging from Content Writers to Spreadsheet Experts to Translators. In addition, you can create your own assistant from scratch.

Since we’ve connected a Notion database of Ben’s Bites tutorial content, we’re going to start with the Content Writer assistant to transform some of our existing tutorials into SEO-optimized blog posts.

When you select a pre-made Dust template, you’ll get an overview of what the Assistant does as well as see its custom instructions. From there, you can edit the Instructions, and by clicking the Advanced Settings button, update the AI model and creativity level too.

For this tutorial, we won’t be touching the Instructions and we’ll set our AI model to GPT-4o with a balanced creativity level.

Click Next and you’ll be taken to a page where you can determine the Actions and Data Sources for your AI assistant. This is where we’ll connect our Notion Database to this specific AI assistant.

Click the Action button and select Use Data sources.

Set the Method to Search and on the next page, select the Notion content you want the AI assistant to be able to search. For this, we’re selecting our Tutorial Content database.

Finally, you can create a Name and Description for your AI assistant. We’re going to leave ours to the defaults that Dust provides.

Once you click Save, your Dust assistant will be created. On the resulting page, you can click on the assistant and update the sharing settings to be a Personal Assistant, Shared Assistant, or Company-wide Assistant.

Step 3: Chat with your content writer Dust assistant

Now that we’ve created our first Dust assistant, we can chat with it, directly referencing content from our Notion database that is synced to it.

To do this, navigate back to the Chat window in Dust and click the New button. In the chat window, ‘@’ your newly created assistant by name, ours is called ‘@contentWriter’, and prompt it to write a blog post about a specific database item in your Notion database.

Sample prompt:

@contentWriter Write a blog post using the tutorial content named "Extract Structured Data from Email" from our Tutorial Content Notion database.

From there, the assistant will provide a summary of the topic, direction, and a list of keywords to target. At this stage, you can edit the direction via a prompt or continue to have it write an outline.

If the outline looks good, you can prompt the Dust assistant to write the SEO-optimized blog post. Incredibly, it can reference links and pull images directly from your Notion database items.

And that’s it! You’ve gone from a Notion database item to an SEO-optimized blog post in just a few steps and prompts.

Next, we’ll create another Dust assistant to summarize tutorial content from our Notion database.

Step 4: Create and chat with a tl;dr Dust assistant

For this one, we’re going to use Dust’s pre-made tl;dr assistant, which will be perfect for creating taglines for our tutorial content stored in our Notion database.

To do this, go through the previous flow outlined in Step 2 for creating a new assistant, but this time, select the ‘@tldr’ assistant.

Follow all of the same assistant creation steps that you did for your Content Writer assistant, customizing the various settings of this tl;dr assistant for your use case as needed.

Once your assistant is created, create a new chat and @ the assistant with your new request. For this example, we’re going to have the tl;dr assistant create a one-sentence summary for this very tutorial!

Sample prompt:

@tldr Create a one-sentence summary for the tutorial content named "Chat with your Notion databases using Dust" from our Tutorial Content Notion database.

Nice work! You’ve now created two Dust assistants connected to a Notion database. From here, you can create more templated Dust assistants based on your specific needs.

There’s a lot more you can do with Dust too, from connecting other data sources to creating your own assistants from scratch — we’ll be creating more tutorials for this platform so stay tuned for those. In the meantime, have fun chatting with your Notion databases using Dust AI assistants.

This tutorial was created by Garrett.