Pulso¶
The green bubble in the bottom-right corner, present in every module. Type a question about your data and it answers with the number - and with the button that opens the real view.
Why it is called Pulso¶
From the Portuguese "tomar o pulso ao negócio" - to take the business's pulse: a quick number on how things stand, with no opinion in between.
It is a tool's name, not a person's, and that is deliberate. Almost every chatbot is called Iris, Sophia or Nova: they want you to talk to them as if they were someone. Here the aim is the opposite - a human name would undo in three letters what the opening message builds.
The first thing it says¶
I am not artificial intelligence. Pulso answers with fixed rules over this sandbox's data. It changes nothing.
This is not modesty, nor a legal notice buried in a footer: it is the first message shown, before any question. And if you ask it directly "are you an AI?" - or "why are you called Pulso?" - it has its own answer:
I am a set of fixed rules: I recognise a few phrases and fetch the number from your data. I do not learn, I do not invent and I write nothing that is not already here.
If I were AI, Article 50 of the AI Act would require the same declaration - the difference is that then I could be confidently wrong.
Why this is here
Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act) requires that anyone interacting with an AI system knows they are talking to a machine. A booking chatbot on a website is the textbook case of limited risk: it is neither prohibited nor subject to a conformity assessment - transparency is enough.
Pulso is not an AI system, so Article 50 does not even apply to it. It declares itself anyway, for two reasons: because an assistant that let itself be mistaken for AI would teach the exact opposite of what the course says, and because the obligation is easier to grasp when you see it met than when you read it in a statute.
Two things, not one¶
Pulso answers numbers and how-to.
| Example | What you get | |
|---|---|---|
| Numbers | "how many proposals are open" | the value, the list, and the button that opens the view |
| How-to | "how do I create a proposal" | the steps in two lines, the module button and the button that opens the right manual page |
Instruction answers carry the How to badge, so there is no doubt about what you are reading.
Why this exists
The manual has 96 pages. Someone halfway through a proposal will not search an index - they will ask the trainer. Pulso answers right there, and the button opens the right page instead of the manual's front door.
The answers are hand-written, like everything else here: Pulso does not summarise the manual, nor read it. It points at it.
How-to - what is covered¶
Twenty-two questions, across the whole journey:
- Records - create a company, a contact, a product
- Proposals - create, add catalogue lines, export PDF, send (online proposal), move status on the Kanban
- Templates - the proposal builder, email templates and tags
- Marketing - campaigns and automations
- GDPR - record a consent, answer a data subject request
- Data - CSV import, sample generator, merging duplicates, custom fields
- Settings - brand and appearance, sales targets
- Learner - submit your work, recover your password
If you write "how…" and it does not recognise the phrase, it still sends you to the manual instead of shrugging. An out-of-scope question - "what is the capital of Australia" - still gets only "I don't know": the manual is not an excuse.
Write freely
You do not have to get the verb right. The matching trims verb endings on both sides, so different conjugations land on the same answer.
What it can answer¶
| Area | Example questions |
|---|---|
| Proposals | "how many proposals are open" · "how much did I sell this month" · "what is my conversion rate" · "which proposals are expiring" |
| Analysis | "why do we lose deals" · "why do we win" |
| Companies | "how many companies do I have" · "which companies have no proposal yet" · "who are the best customers" |
| Calendar | "what do I have today" · "do I have overdue tasks" |
| Service | "how are the support cases" · "any cases past SLA" |
| GDPR | "any data subject requests pending" |
| Retention | "any contracts at risk" |
Below the conversation there are clickable suggestions - the questions it is guaranteed to recognise, with the ones for the module you are in first. If you are starting out, start there.
Ctrl+K
Opens and closes Pulso from anywhere. Escape closes it too.
Yours, not everyone's¶
Writing "my" or "I" narrows the answer to your user:
- "open proposals" → all of them in the base.
- "my open proposals" → only the ones you own.
The same applies to "how much did I sell this month", which compares against your individual quota instead of the team target.
Asking about a customer¶
Type a company name and you get the thirty-second summary - what you want to know before you call:
Silva & Filhos, Lda. · E001. ⚠ Before you call: 1 support case still open. Stage Customer · Gold · lead score 87 1 won proposal · 8236,08 € 1 contact: João Silva Last activity: Email sent · 24/08/2026
The warning line only shows when something would spoil the call: open support cases, a cancellation request in progress, or contacts with no active consent.
It works with the full name ("how is Silva & Filhos doing?") and with the first word ("has Silva paid?").
Two safeguards worth discussing
The short form is only accepted if the sentence is short and no other company starts with the same word. With two Silvas, it would rather not answer than answer about the wrong one.
And "how do I create a proposal for Silva" returns the how-to, not the record: when an instruction question matches exactly, it beats the name.
Same principle as always: between staying quiet and being right by luck, it stays quiet.
The three rules¶
If it does not recognise the question, it says so - and says why: "I only recognise the phrases I was programmed for". It does not guess, does not return an approximate number and does not change the subject.
This is deliberate. An assistant that always answers something is friendlier and far more dangerous: a wrong number delivered with confidence enters decisions without anyone questioning it.
It changes no record whatsoever. It does not create, delete or move statuses. At most it opens the right view - every answer ends in a button (See proposals, See calendar) that takes you to the module with the filter already applied.
That makes it a navigation shortcut, not a parallel truth: the number it states and the number on screen come from the same place - and the text it gives is the text in the manual.
The only thing it writes is the log of questions it could not answer (see above) - and it says that it does.
It only answers about modules you can access. If your user group cannot see the Helpdesk, asking about cases returns "I don't know how to answer that" - and the suggestion does not even appear in the list.
What it could not answer¶
Whenever Pulso does not recognise a question, it keeps it. You see it in two places:
- Settings → Unanswered questions to Pulso - your own log, with a clear button.
- In the submission, for the trainer: the assessment sheet shows what each learner tried to ask without success.
For the trainer: the cheapest signal the app gives
What people try to ask is what they did not understand. If half the class writes "how do I make a quote", the problem is not Pulso - it is that nobody connected quote to proposal. That is vocabulary to fix in the next session, and there is no other way to find it.
It is also the list of what Pulso is missing, written by the people using it rather than guessed by whoever programmed it.
Logging without saying so would be the opposite of what this app teaches
So Pulso declares the log in its opening message, before the first question - including that it is visible in the submission.
It is worth pausing here with the class: it is free text written by an identified person, stored and shown to a third party. This is not a hard GDPR case - it is a mundane one, the kind that slips through every day in real products. The difference between getting it right and getting it wrong was one sentence.
What sets it apart from the Dashboard¶
At first glance it is redundant: "how many open proposals" is already on the Dashboard. The difference lies in the questions that have no screen:
- "which companies have no proposal yet" - it exists nowhere in the app; it is the cross between the company list and the proposal list.
- "do I have overdue tasks" - the Calendar shows the calendar, not the list of what is past due.
The Dashboard shows the numbers somebody decided to show. A CRM always has more useful combinations than it has screens to hold them.
Pedagogy (UFCD 10868 · 10870)
It is worth using this assistant as a three-part exercise:
- Ask it questions it cannot answer. It is the fastest way to see that an assistant only reaches as far as the data reaches - and that the limit is almost always in the record keeping, not in the engine.
- Compare it with a real chatbot. An LLM would answer "what is the capital of Australia"; this one will not. It would also invent a sales figure if the data were missing - and this one will not. Discuss which of the two behaviours you want in a CRM.
- Connect it to the AI Act. If this assistant were swapped for one with AI behind it, what would change? It would become limited risk (Art. 50); it would still have to declare itself; and AI literacy (Art. 4, in force since February 2025) would require whoever operates it to understand its limits.