WorkBuddy monthly visits exceed 20M; took me two weeks to understand what it actually does

Just saw that Analysys report: WorkBuddy hit 20.97 million monthly visits, more than the second and third places combined. The data is scary, but my first reaction was: what are so many people using it for? I've used it for nearly two weeks and barely figured out what it's best suited for.

First, some background. I work in psychological counseling and handle a lot of interview transcripts and case summaries. Last week, I took on a corporate group counseling project. A dozen interview transcripts piled up on my desk, with inconsistent formats—some sorted by time, some scattered by theme, and two were messy transcripts from audio recordings. Previously, I might have spent an afternoon organizing them myself, but this time I wanted to try WorkBuddy.

Step one was creating a knowledge base. This feature is in the left sidebar; click Knowledge Base, create a new one, and name it after the project. I dumped all the interview transcripts in there, about twelve or thirteen files, a mix of PDFs and Words. Here's a pitfall: check if the files can be recognized first. Two were scanned images, which WorkBuddy couldn't recognize, so I had to run OCR to convert them to text versions first. I didn't notice initially, so it showed as uploaded in the list, but the actual content was empty. Later I realized it was a format issue.

Then I created an automation task and wrote in the requirement to organize interview transcripts. WorkBuddy has a "Skill Center" with preset office skill templates, like document organization, meeting minutes, and data analysis. I selected a skill called "Structured Organization" and filled in specific instructions. I stumbled on instructions once before—I wrote a post last week about this. Back then, I asked it to categorize files by date, and it failed. So I learned my lesson: let WorkBuddy do only one thing at a time, and write the rules very specifically.

My instruction this time was roughly: extract three dimensions from each interview transcript—core demands, emotional state, and coping mechanisms—and output them in a unified table format. The first run wasn't bad, but it misunderstood some content. For example, it categorized "the client said they haven't been sleeping well recently" as a "physiological issue," whereas it was more a manifestation of anxiety. So I manually adjusted it, adding a line to the instructions: "Judge based on context, don't just look at literal meanings."

WorkBuddy has an Expert Mode where you can assign an identity to the AI, like psychologist, financial analyst, etc., and it processes tasks according to that identity's logic. I tried setting it to psychologist, and the output summaries were indeed more appropriate, with terminology clearly from the industry. But don't expect it to fully understand your profession; it just references more relevant corpora.

Permissions gave me some trouble too. We collaborate as a pair: I handle organization, and my colleague handles review. WorkBuddy supports setting collaborator permissions, restricting who can view, edit, or run tasks. I set my colleague to view and comment-only permissions, so she could annotate issues but wouldn't accidentally change my task configurations. This design is good; otherwise, two people messing with the same task simultaneously easily leads to chaos.

For daily maintenance, I recommend clearing task records weekly. WorkBuddy saves every task run, which takes up space over time, and long lists make things harder to find. I usually archive completed tasks confirmed to be fine and delete intermediate failed versions to keep the workspace clean.

Another tip: WorkBuddy supports connecting to WeCom and WeChat. I connected it to WeCom, so for urgent organization needs, I can just say something on my phone, and it runs. By the time I'm back at my computer, the results are ready. This feature is quite friendly for people who aren't always at their desks.

Honestly, WorkBuddy's upper limit depends on the precision of your problem description. At first, I threw everything at it, and it returned a bunch of bland stuff. Later, I treated it like an intern needing explicit instructions, and it became much smoother. For every task, clarify the input, output, format, and boundaries. It's not a tool that reads minds, but if you spell out the rules, it executes pretty fast.

One last note: from my testing, there's a hard limit on long document processing. I wrote a post about this before. If you have a particularly long document, suggest feeding it in segments or changing the approach to let it process only part of the content. Don't expect an 80-page report to be organized in one go. I've encountered cases where it spun for ages and finally gave me just a table of contents.

Anyway, WorkBuddy is now my fixed workflow for handling counseling files, saving me about 60% of the time from organization to archiving. But if you ask me if it's truly better than other tools, I can't say for sure, since I haven't carefully tried the others.