I feel with recent versions BTT's AI Assistants are pretty powerful and easy to access, so here a short tutorial on how to use them.
Work in Progress Tutorial, created with BTT 6.859
I'll start with some generic Setup advice, then follow with these concrete examples. The generic setup only needs to be done once and can be reused for lots of usecases.
- Example 1: Summarize / analyze selected File(s) in Finder
- Example 2: Quickly Work With Something Visible On Screen
- Example 3: Extract Something From Currently Open Website and render it nicely
- Example 4: Background Execution
Setup
Show Setup Instructions
First we need to configure an AI Assistant, to do that go to the h@llo.ai / AI Assistants section in BTT and add a new item. Then select h@llo.ai - AI Assistant:
Afterwards you'll see the default configuration form - I recommend to click the "Use Wizard For Initial Configuration" button:
In the first wizard step you need to select the kind of AI provider you'll want to use. Unless you have a very powerful Mac, I'd recommend to use the Cloud API option with your own API Key - this is the most powerful and most flexible option. Alternatively you can proxy the requests through some CLI like Claude, Codex or OpenCode , however these might not work for all use cases.
After configuring your credentials, make sure the test returns successfully:
Then in the last wizard step we can choose what capabilities our Assistant shall have. In theory you can just enable everything, but that is usually overkill and leads to higher token usage. For this tutorial I would select the following default skills:
- General Asssistant
- Text Editing
And additionally create a custom skill for working with files and running apple scripts to retrieve the selected files.
Also include access to the "render_interactive_content" tool in the custom skill, which allows the assistant to show some custom ui:
Now let's set up a keyboard shortcut to quickly show our assistant:
Example 1: Summarize / analyze selected File(s) in Finder
Here I'm asking the assistant to look at the differences between multiple selected BTT preset files (could be anything)
Example 2 - Working With Screenshots
Example 3: Extract & Summarize Content From Webpage
Example 4: Background Task
Taking the recipe example from example 3 but using it in a background execution action: