Sim AI user guide¶
Illinois Chat uses Sim AI as its tool platform: workflows built and deployed in a Sim workspace become tools that chatbots can call during a conversation. This guide covers how to get access to Sim, how to wire a Sim workspace into an Illinois Chat project, how to let others build tools with you, and which blocks you can use.
If you maintain the deployment rather than build tools with it, read the Sim AI operator guide instead. For how tools behave once they are connected, see Tools & Workflows; for a complete worked example, see Build a Tool in Sim.
Wherever this guide says to contact support, use the support address in the footer of this page. If you use a self-hosted deployment, contact the people who run it instead.
Signing in to Sim with your Illinois identity (Keycloak SSO)¶
Sim shares the same Keycloak realm as Illinois Chat, so you sign in to Sim with the same account you use for the chat app — there is no separate Sim password.
- Open Sim (sim.chat.illinois.edu on the hosted site, or your deployment's Sim URL).
- On the login page, enter your email address and choose the single sign-on option. Only
addresses in the deployment's SSO domain (
illinois.eduon the hosted site) are accepted; addresses in any other domain are refused. - You are redirected to Keycloak. Log in with your Illinois Chat credentials.
- Keycloak sends you back to Sim, which creates your Sim identity automatically on the first sign-in.
Waiting for approval¶
New Sim accounts do not get access immediately. Every first sign-in lands in a
pending state ("Pending admin approval") and the account is held until a Sim platform
admin approves it. If you see a message that your account is banned or pending, nothing
is wrong — an admin simply has not approved you yet. Contact support with the address you
signed in with, then sign in again once you have been approved; there is no need to
re-register.
Connecting a Sim workspace to an Illinois Chat project¶
Tools are configured per project by a project owner or admin on the project's Tools
page (/<project-name>/tools, "Tools" in the sidebar). You need two values from Sim:
- API key — in Sim, open Settings → Sim Keys and create an API key
(
sk-sim-...). The key is stored encrypted server-side and only a masked version is ever shown again. If the Tools page later reports that the stored key "could not be read", paste the key again. - Workspace ID — in Sim, open the workspace you want to connect; the workspace ID
is the identifier in the browser URL (
.../workspace/<workspace-id>/...) and in the workspace settings.
On the Tools page:
- Paste the API Key and Workspace ID.
- Base URL is optional: leave it blank to use the deployment default. Only set it if your operator has told you to point the project at a different Sim instance; other URLs are rejected when you save.
- Save. The page lists every deployed workflow discovered in the workspace, along with the input fields each workflow expects.
Only deployed workflows are discovered — drafts do not appear until you deploy them in Sim. Give each workflow a clear description in Sim: the description is what the model reads when deciding whether to call your tool. Sim has several fields called "description", and only one of them reaches Illinois Chat: open the workflow, click Deploy, open the API tab, click Edit API Info and fill in Description (the same dialog edits the per-input descriptions). The version description on the General tab, the MCP tool description and the chat description are stored separately and are never read. A workflow with no description in that field is flagged on the Tools page with "No description in Sim", and the model is given a placeholder built from the workflow name and its input fields instead.
The Tools page also shows the project's tool-routing status: Custom router (tool calls are routed through the project's own OpenAI or OpenAI-compatible provider), Default router (the Illinois-hosted model does the routing), or Offline (no router is configured — add an LLM key on the project's LLMs page, or ask the operator to configure the hosted default).
Letting others build tools in your workspace¶
Tool building happens in Sim, so collaboration is managed with Sim's own workspace membership:
- Each collaborator first needs Sim access: they sign in via SSO once and a platform admin approves them (see Signing in).
- In Sim, open your workspace and invite them by email from the workspace's member management, granting write (edit) permission so they can create and deploy workflows.
- Anything they deploy in that workspace automatically appears on the Tools page of every Illinois Chat project connected to that workspace ID — no extra configuration in Illinois Chat is needed.
Keep in mind that the project's Sim API key is what executes the tools, and workspace membership is what controls who can add or change them. Removing someone from the workspace (or blocking their Sim account) immediately stops them from editing tools; undeploying a workflow in Sim removes it from every connected project's tool list.
In chat, users can toggle individual tools on or off per conversation from the settings panel's Tools tab; enabled tools are offered to the model automatically when a message looks like it needs one.
Which Sim blocks you can use¶
Not every block Sim ships is available on this deployment. When you open the block picker you will see the core workflow blocks plus a selected set of tools you can authenticate yourself. Everything else is hidden on purpose.
This list describes the hosted site
The lists below are the configuration of the hosted Illinois Chat deployment. A self-hosted deployment chooses its own list; if you run one, see the operator guide.
What you can use¶
Core workflow blocks — Agent, API, Condition, Function, Router, Response, Evaluator, Guardrails, Human in the Loop, Variables, Wait, Note, Translate, Memory, Knowledge, MCP, nested Workflow, Table, Logs, File and Webhook, plus the Schedule, Webhook, RSS, IMAP and workspace-event triggers. These need no credentials from anyone. The blocks that call a language model — Agent, Router, Evaluator, Translate and Guardrails — take a model provider API key that you supply in the block itself.
Tools you authenticate yourself. Each takes a key, token or connection string that you obtain and paste into the block. Nothing is stored or shared by us.
| Group | Available |
|---|---|
| Search and web | Exa, Tavily, Perplexity, Linkup, Serper, Google Search, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, ArXiv, Firecrawl |
| Documents and parsing | Jina, Mistral Parser, Reducto, AWS Textract, LaTeX, Google Books |
| Vectors and memory | Pinecone, Qdrant, Mem0, Zep, Embeddings |
| Databases | PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Neo4j, ClickHouse, Redis |
| Messaging and email | SMTP, SendGrid, Resend, Discord, Telegram |
| Code and repositories | GitHub, GitLab |
| Media and language | Text to Speech, Speech to Text, Image Generator, ElevenLabs, Google Translate |
Wikipedia, ArXiv, DuckDuckGo and LaTeX need no credential at all. The database blocks take your own connection string.
What is not available, and why¶
Vendors that sign you in with a Connect button are not available in this release. That covers Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar and Gmail, along with Notion, Jira, Confluence, Box, Dropbox, Zoom, Slack, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, HubSpot, Salesforce, Linear, Airtable, Microsoft 365 and the rest. Entering your own credentials in one of these blocks does not change that; they stay unavailable until support for them is added.
Some other tools are not enabled yet, including the cloud infrastructure and security tools such as AWS, SSH, SFTP, Okta and 1Password.
Some blocks you may have seen in Sim's own documentation are not offered here: Search, Sim Chat, Data Enrichment, Connected Accounts, Credential, Pi, A2A, Circleback and Video Generator.
If something you built stops working¶
Two things can happen to an existing workflow.
A workflow that uses a switched-off block fails when it runs. The error names the block and says it is blocked by the server policy. The workflow itself is not modified, and it will keep appearing as deployed, so the failure only shows up on execution.
An agent that had a switched-off vendor attached as a tool keeps running, but quietly stops using that tool. There is no error in this case. If an agent used to read from Notion and simply no longer does, this is the most likely reason. Check the agent's attached tools.
In Illinois Chat, either case surfaces mid-conversation rather than as a missing tool, because the tool list is built from what is deployed in Sim.
Asking for a block to be added¶
Contact support with the block you need and what you are building with it. Requests like these help decide which blocks are added next.
Learning more about Sim itself¶
Everything above is specific to this deployment. For how Sim works in general — writing prompts, wiring blocks together, testing a workflow — use Sim's own documentation.
Sim's published docs at docs.sim.ai always describe their latest release, while this deployment runs a pinned, slightly older one (Sim v0.8.4). The table gives both: the page as it was for the pinned version (the documentation source at that release, viewed on GitHub) and the current page.
| Topic | Why it matters here | Pinned version (v0.8.4) | Current docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build your first workflow | The starting point. | v0.8.4 | current |
| Blocks reference | What each core block does. Agent, API, Condition, Function, Router and Response are the ones you will use most, and all are available here. | v0.8.4 | current |
| Connecting blocks | How data flows from one block into the next. | v0.8.4 | current |
| Variables and secrets | Storing an API key once and referencing it as {{KEY}} instead of pasting it into every block. |
v0.8.4 | current |
| Triggers | How a workflow starts. For Illinois Chat tools the Start trigger matters most: the inputs you declare on it become the tool's parameters, and a workflow whose inputs have no descriptions is skipped by discovery rather than published with a guessed signature. | v0.8.4 | current |
| Integrations | One page per tool block, listing its operations and the inputs each needs. | v0.8.4 | current |
The whole documentation set for the pinned version is browsable at
apps/docs/content/docs/en at e741923f.
Two caveats when reading the current docs. Most of them apply unchanged, but:
- A block or feature described there may not exist here yet. If the block picker does not show something the docs mention, it is either newer than the pinned version or not on the allowed list above.
- Anything about billing, hosted keys or "Sim Cloud" does not apply. This is a self-hosted instance. Where the docs say Sim supplies a key for you, you supply your own.