Assistly now searches the web, mid-answer
By The Assistly team ·
There is a particular way an assistant wastes your time on a live call, and it is confidence about things it cannot know. You ask what a competitor charges and get a number from whenever the model last read the internet — stated in the same steady voice as everything else, with nothing to tell you it is eighteen months stale.
Web search fixes that. It's on now, and it doesn't ask you to set anything up.
Built in, not bolted on
A model's training is frozen on a date, and a great deal of what gets asked on a live call is newer than that: what a competitor charges now, what shipped in the latest release, who runs a company this quarter, whether a rumour is true.
Assistly searches the web itself when the answer depends on any of that — during the answer, not as a separate step you have to ask for. You ask the question the way you already ask questions. If the answer needs something fresh, Assistly goes and gets it on the way to answering.
you · did they ship the SSO they announced, or is it still "coming soon"?
It shipped — it went out in last Tuesday's release, on their Business plan and up [1].
⌗ Searched the web · 1 source
The answer cites what it used, inline, and carries a Searched the web badge so you know where it came from. An answer built on something Assistly read thirty seconds ago should look different from one built on what it already knew — so it does.
Nothing to connect
There's no key to paste, no integration to enable, no server to point at. Web search is there on every account, and it runs everywhere an answer runs: on typed questions, on Assist, and on questions Assistly picks up from the call itself.
If you've connected your own tools over MCP, those stay exactly where they were. Web search sits alongside them as the tool for the one source none of them cover — the public internet, as of right now.
It also knows when not to search
This matters more than it sounds, because every search happens inside an answer you're waiting on. A search that wasn't needed is pure delay, and on a live call delay is the one thing you can't get back.
So Assistly doesn't search for things it already knows — a definition, an algorithm, arithmetic, code it can simply write. It doesn't search for anything already answerable from your screen or the conversation. It doesn't search the web for your own past meetings; that's the session search, which reads your history. And it doesn't search for you personally — the open web doesn't know you, and a search for a private individual returns a stranger.
It does search when you push back. "Are you sure?" or "I think that changed" is a cue to go and check rather than to restate the same answer more firmly — or to fold and agree with you when you were the one who was wrong.
Search results are sources, not instructions
Search results are treated as what they are: text from public web pages, quoted as source material. A page that happens to contain instructions is a stranger's writing, not you talking — Assistly reads it for facts and nothing else.
The same discipline applies to numbers. Assistly won't state a figure the results don't contain. If the pages it read don't say what something costs, the answer says that, rather than filling the gap with a plausible guess dressed up as a citation.
It doesn't cost you time
Web search could easily have made the assistant slower, and on a live call a slower answer is a worse answer no matter how well informed it is.
So search only runs when the model decides the question needs it — which is the whole point of teaching it when not to. A question it can answer from what it knows, from your screen, or from your documents is answered the way it always was, with no round trip to the web in between.
What this adds up to
You stop mentally discounting every answer about the outside world by "well, how old is this model?" The assistant checks the fresh stuff and shows you the sources it read, inside the answer.
Web search handles what changes out in the world. For what stays true about you — how you like answers written, what your product costs, what your role is — Assistly now remembers what you tell it too.
Download Assistly and ask it something the model couldn't know.