A short guide to Clay, the assistant inside your Kinds workshop.

If you’re partway through a security workshop and something doesn’t make sense, you can just ask. There’s a box at the bottom of every screen. Type the question, get an answer, carry on. The workshop waits for you.

That’s the whole thing. The rest of this page is the detail.

Ask whatever you’re actually wondering

Most people don’t ask because they assume the answer will be a definition they didn’t want. It won’t be. Clay knows which screen you’re on and what you’re being asked to decide, so you can be as vague as you feel.

Things that work perfectly well as questions:

• “Sorry, what am I actually deciding here?”

• “Why is that one wrong?”

• “Would this actually work on me?”

• “What does that word mean?”

You don’t have to phrase it properly. You don’t have to know the right term.

Yes, it will just tell you the answer

If you’re stuck on a decision and you ask which option is right, Clay tells you. Plainly, with the reason.

It isn’t allowed to give you a hint instead and make you work it out. That’s a deliberate rule, not an accident, and the thinking behind it is simple: opening the chat is already more effort than guessing. If you cared enough to ask, you shouldn’t be punished for it.

So ask. That’s what it’s there for.

Type it, say it, or call

Three ways in, and they’re all the same conversation.

Type. The box at the bottom of the screen.

Speak. Tap the microphone and talk instead of typing. It works in whatever language your workshop is running in.

Call. Tap the phone icon and have an actual spoken conversation. You can interrupt it mid-sentence, the way you would a person, and it’ll stop and listen.

If you’re on a call and hang up halfway through, nothing is lost. The next thing you type still knows what you were talking about.

Your manager can’t read this

Worth knowing before you type anything you’d rather not share.

Your company can see your workshop answers and that you used the assistant. They cannot see what you asked or what it said. There’s no screen for it and no way to export it. Kinds keeps the conversations to improve the training, stored against a random ID rather than your name or email, and deletes them after 180 days.

This matters because of the next part.

It’s okay to say you clicked something

People do. Constantly. Usually they say nothing because they’re embarrassed, and the not-saying is what turns a small problem into a large one.

If a workshop reminds you of something that actually happened, you can say so. “I think I clicked a link like this last week.” Clay will point you at the right person at your own company to tell, and encourage you to tell them even if you’re not sure it was anything.

It won’t lecture you. It isn’t allowed to. Same goes for admitting you’ve used one password everywhere for years, or that you picked the wrong option and feel silly about it. Those workshops exist so you can get it wrong somewhere it doesn’t count.

You can answer in your own words

On the screens where you’re making a decision, you don’t have to pick one of the buttons. You can type what you’d genuinely do.

If you’d forward it to your IT team, say that. If you’d ring your manager on the number you’ve already got saved, say that. If you’d honestly just ignore the whole thing and get on with your afternoon, say that too. That counts as correct, because you didn’t do the harmful thing. You’ll get a note about what would make it better, which is usually telling someone, but you won’t be marked down for it.

Vague answers don’t count against you either. If what you type doesn’t clearly say what you’d do, the options just come back and you pick one.

You can answer in your own language too. It’s graded on what you said, not which language you said it in.

What it can’t help with

Your company’s actual setup. It doesn’t know what security tools you have or how they’re configured. Ask your IT team.

Anything it wasn’t taught. If you ask for a statistic the workshop doesn’t cover, it’ll tell you it doesn’t know rather than make one up. That’s on purpose.

A real emergency. If something is happening right now, don’t work through a training module. Contact your IT or security team directly.

Frequently asked questions

Will asking for help lower my score?

No. Asking doesn’t affect your score at all, and the assistant is specifically built to give you the answer rather than withhold it. Your score comes from the decisions you make in the workshop, and there’s nothing recorded anywhere that counts how often you asked for help.

Can I ask about security things outside this workshop?

Yes. If you want to know whether the coffee shop wifi is risky for work email, or how ransomware gets onto a laptop, ask. You’ll get a real answer and then a nudge back to the story. Genuinely unrelated questions get a polite no, and no lecture about it.

What if I’m halfway through and have to stop?

Close it and come back. The workshop remembers where you were, and so does the conversation.

Related reading

• What is phishing?

• What are phishing red flags?

• What is a voice cloning attack?

• Kinds Security glossary

Security training usually gives you nowhere to put the question you actually have. This one does. Use it.