Prompting for beginners: be specific

Toqan is a powerful AI agent and can draw from many sources if you ask it to. It doesn’t know you – unless you provide it with info in the personalisation section – so you need to be specific in your query. This way Toqan can better understand what you want and what format you want it in.

Here you can see the difference in the responses. Toqan is asked to summarise an AI landscape report, which covers various topics related to AI.

The prompt: Summarise this document. Give me the highlights.

The outcome isn’t terrible. It gives a clear overview of what’s in the report but if you wanted to have a meatier overview, the below option would be better. It is also in a specific format, as instructed.

The prompt: Summarise this document. Give me the 5 most important topics covered with a 50-word paragraph summarising each topic.