overview.mdx

title	description
Tools Overview	How to use tools with Onyx

Tools are a way to give an Assistant additional capabilities. They allow the assistant to do things like:

1. Fetch information from an external source (e.g. a database, an API, the Internet, etc.)
2. Perform actions (e.g. write to a database, send an email, etc.)
3. Generate content (e.g. generate an Image, create a plot, etc.)

By default, we have a three tools built-in to Onyx. These are:

• SearchTool. This is the core of Onyx. Adding this tool to an Assistant allows it to search over the knowledge you've connected up to Onyx through Connectors. This is the only tool available to the default Onyx assistant.

• ImageGenerationTool. This leverages DALLE-3 to generate images.

• InternetSearchTool. This uses Bing to search the internet. To enable this as an option, set the BING_API_KEY environment variable.