Sistava

How to Use Sintra AI: Getting Started With Your Helpers

How-to — — by Mahmoud Zalt

A practical walkthrough of the Sintra workspace: the sidebar, Brain AI, your first helper chat, use cases, and what to set up first.

Most people who sign up for Sintra open it, see twelve friendly faces with names, and freeze. That is a reasonable reaction. The product looks like a team roster, so the instinct is to meet everyone, and meeting everyone is the slowest possible way to get value out of it.

This guide walks the setup in the order that actually pays off. Load context, connect what you need, open one helper, and get one usable output. Everything else can wait until that loop works.

Sintra runs as a web app and also ships iOS and Android apps, according to their help centre. The web app has the fuller interface, and a few settings described below are noted in their docs as browser only, so do your first setup on a desktop.

What is a Sintra helper, exactly?

A helper is a role-specific assistant with its own name, its own area of expertise, and its own set of pre-built tasks. Sintra's documentation describes them as AI employees designed to assist with daily work tasks, each with industry knowledge and its own tools.

Their help centre lists twelve core helpers. Knowing who does what saves you from asking the wrong one and getting a vague answer.

HelperRole
BuddyBusiness development
CassieCustomer support
CommeteCommerce
DexterData analyst
EmmieEmail marketer
GigiPersonal development
MilliSales manager
PennCopywriter
ScoutyRecruiter
SeomiSEO specialist
SoshieSocial media manager
VizzyVirtual assistant

The split matters more than it looks. Sintra's docs note that some actions only work through the helper that owns them, so social posting runs through Soshie and email retrieval runs through Cassie. Asking a generalist for a specialist's action is the most common early mistake.

How do you navigate the Sintra workspace?

Everything lives in the left sidebar. Sintra's navigation article describes the workspaces button as the only coloured one, showing your current workspace and letting you switch or create another.

The rest of the sidebar, as their docs describe it, covers the home page with a search bar and helper access, an inbox holding items that need your attention, automations, Brain AI, chat history, a tasks area for recurring helper tasks, a refer a friend link, and account settings under the cogwheel icon.

What should you set up first in Sintra?

Brain AI, before anything else. It is Sintra's knowledge base, reached from a brain icon in the left navigation on web, or in the bottom-right corner on mobile. Their documentation is explicit that all helpers and their use cases can read from Brain AI, so context you load once is context every helper gets.

Sintra describes the Brain AI area as three parts: a workspace overview where you set the workspace type, name, profile image and colour, a list of available integrations, and the knowledge collection holding everything you have added.

Your first thirty minutes in Sintra

  1. Open Brain AI and set up the workspace — Use the brain icon in the left navigation. Set the workspace name and details in the workspace overview section so helpers know which business they are working for.
  2. Add your real business context — Sintra's docs list text you type in, publicly accessible webpage links, and file uploads. Documented file types include PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, JSON, HTML and XML for documents, CSV, XLSX and XLS for spreadsheets, JPG, PNG, GIF and WEBP for images, and MP4, AVI, WEBM and MOV for video, with a 20MB cap per file.
  3. Connect only the integration you need today — The integrations list sits inside Brain AI. Sintra's Google guide describes finding the integration, clicking Connect, then Connect again or Add new account, choosing the account, granting permissions, and watching the Connect button turn into a green checkmark.
  4. Open one helper and describe one real job — Pick the helper whose role matches the task. Write the request the way you would brief a new hire: what you want, who it is for, and what a good result looks like.
  5. Tune the helper's settings, then run it again — Sintra's chat documentation describes a cog-wheel settings panel on the browser app with a vibe slider from official to casual, message length options, language level, a Google search toggle, a writing style toggle, and a custom instructions field.
  6. Only then add a second helper — Expanding before the first loop works multiplies the number of things you have to debug at once. Sintra's own getting-started guidance also recommends prioritising the helpers closest to your immediate needs and expanding gradually.

One documented limit is worth knowing before you paste in a list of URLs. Sintra's Brain AI article notes that websites with anti-scraping measures cannot be indexed, and that text files need selectable, copyable text to be processed. A scanned PDF of your policy document will not do what you hope.

If a link fails, paste the text directly instead. It is less elegant and it works every time.

What are use cases, and where do you find them?

Use cases, which Sintra's help centre notes were previously called power-ups, are clickable buttons that make a helper run a specific task immediately with very little input from you. They are the shortcut for anyone who does not want to write a prompt.

Sintra documents two ways in. Inside a helper's chat there is an Explore use-cases button that expands that helper's list. From the home page, their docs describe a search all option below the search bar that shows use cases across all helpers, filterable by theme.

Start with use cases before you start writing long prompts. They are pre-tested by Sintra, which means they fail less often than a first attempt at a custom brief, and they show you the shape of request each helper responds to well.

How do automations and recurring tasks differ?

These are two separate things in Sintra and they sit in two separate sidebar entries, which trips people up. Automations are pre-built workflows you switch on. Recurring tasks are instructions you write once and schedule.

Sintra's automations article names five: a Social Media Manager powered by Soshie that generates weekly posts, an Inbox Manager that categorises email and drafts responses, a Meeting Notetaker under Vizzy, a Daily Summarizer covering email, calendar and task suggestions, and a Facebook Commenter under Cassie.

Recurring tasks are managed from the Tasks tab in the left sidebar rather than from a chat, and Sintra's documentation says they can run as often as every ten minutes. That frequency is a real capability and also a real way to spend credits quickly, which is covered in the limits section below.

The setup work nobody warns you about

Fair credit where it is due: Sintra's onboarding is genuinely quicker than most tools in this category, and the Brain AI idea of one shared knowledge base across every helper is a good design. You do not re-explain your business twelve times.

But the pattern is still the same one every workflow tool has. You configure the context, you connect the accounts, you tune the settings, you test, and then you maintain all of it as your business changes.

Set-up work like this is exactly what we removed at Sistava. Rather than loading a knowledge base and tuning sliders before you get a first result, you hire an AI Employee and tell it in plain English what you want handled. It has the tools connected already, it asks you when it is unsure, and it sets itself up. Nothing to configure first, nothing to maintain after.

Limits and gotchas worth knowing on day one

None of these are reasons to avoid the product. They are the things that turn a frustrating first week into a productive one, and they are easier to plan around than to discover at credit zero on day eighteen.

If you want the specifics on credit burn before you commit real work to it, read the credits walkthrough linked in the sources below.

FAQ

How do I start using Sintra AI?

Open Brain AI from the left navigation, set up your workspace and add your business context, connect the one integration you need, then open a single helper and give it one real task. Sintra's own getting-started guidance also recommends prioritising the helpers closest to your immediate needs and expanding from there.

How many helpers does Sintra have?

Sintra's help centre lists twelve core helpers: Buddy, Cassie, Commet, Dexter, Emmie, Gigi, Milli, Penn, Scouty, Seomi, Soshie and Vizzy. Their overview page also mentions custom helpers and a marketplace of community-built ones, so check their current documentation for what your plan includes.

What is Brain AI in Sintra?

Brain AI is the knowledge base for your workspace. You add text, publicly accessible webpage links and files, and Sintra's documentation states that all helpers and their use cases can read from it, so context you add once is available to every helper.

What are Sintra use cases and power-ups?

Use cases are clickable buttons that make a helper run a common task immediately with minimal input. Sintra's help centre notes they were formerly called power-ups. You reach them from the Explore use-cases button inside a helper chat, or from the search all option on the home page.

Does Sintra have a mobile app?

Sintra's help centre lists a web app plus iOS and Android apps. Some settings, including the helper settings panel, are documented as browser only, so first-time setup is easier on desktop.

What is the difference between automations and recurring tasks?

Automations are pre-built workflows you switch on from the Automations area, such as the Social Media Manager or the Daily Summarizer. Recurring tasks are instructions you write yourself and schedule from the Tasks tab, and Sintra's documentation says they can run as often as every ten minutes.

Sources