MAW Assistant

MAW Assistant is a Discord bot. It reads your station's own records — what is on air, how the last broadcast went, what is scheduled next — and answers from them. It is available to customers with an active subscription.

Connecting it

1. 01

   Link Discord to MAWCast

   Control → Connections → Discord. This is what tells the assistant who you are.

2. 02

   Run /maw in the MAWCast server

   Setup takes about a minute: your default station, your language, and what you want to be told about. Everything is changeable afterwards from /maw → Settings.

MAW Assistant and MAW Assistant AI

Every plan includes MAW Assistant. Higher plans add MAW Assistant AI, which lets you ask in your own words. The buttons, alerts and diagnostics are the same on every plan — AI is a way to ask, not the part that makes the rest work.

Which one you have is read from your subscription every time you use it — nothing in Discord can change it. If you ask a lower plan something that genuinely needs AI, it does not guess: it offers to diagnose your station, lets you choose the problem from a list, and points to the closest guide.

Using it

/maw opens the home: your station's status and one button each for Station, Listeners, Now playing, Schedule, AutoDJ, Storage, Notifications and Get help. A single word in a direct message does the same — status, schedule, autodj, oyentes — in any of the seven languages.

Guided diagnostics

Get help → pick the problem: station offline, no audio, encoder won't connect, AutoDJ isn't playing, metadata isn't updating. It checks what MAWCast can actually see — whether anything is on air, live or AutoDJ, since when, whether AutoDJ is on and has music, what title is arriving — and says plainly what it cannot see: it does not listen to your audio, and it does not see failed connection attempts. Each result links the matching troubleshooting guide.

When your plan changes

It tells you once, the next time you use it. Moving down keeps everything you set up — station, language, timezone, notifications and reports — and every button keeps working, and so do common requests typed in your own words; only the AI answers to open questions stop. Moving up adds them without asking you to set anything up again.

Writing to it in your own words

On every plan, a direct message is read by MAW Assistant itself first — no AI involved. It understands the seven languages whichever one you chose for its replies (Portuguese from Brazil and from Portugal alike), fixes common typos, recognises your own stations, shows and playlists by name — including abbreviations you use — and reads dates and times in your timezone: “cuántos oyentes hay”, “¿y ayer?”, “mete Underground el viernes a las diez”. When it is not sure, it asks which of two or three things you meant instead of guessing. Only what it still cannot place goes to AI, on the plans that include it.

Changing your station from Discord

It can tell you what is on today, tomorrow or this week, what is next, and everything about one programme (“when is Underground Sessions?”). It can create, move, rename, recolour and delete shows, set their reminders, skip the current AutoDJ track and switch the AutoDJ playlist. Every one of those shows you exactly what it understood — and asks only for what is missing, like a time that could be 10:00 or 22:00 — before anything changes. Create show (or Confirm) makes the change; Edit lets you change any detail, or tell it the reading was wrong; Cancel just drops it. Deleting a repeating programme asks whether you mean only that airing, that one and the ones after it, or the whole series. The change is made by MAWCast, with the same checks as Control: overlapping shows are refused, playlists must belong to the station.

MAW Assistant does not manage recordings. Recording management is in MAWCast Studio and MAWCast Control.

What it learns — and what it never does

When it did not understand something and you then chose what you meant, or AI understood it for you, it keeps a note of what was meant — the intent and the words that pointed at it — so the same kind of message is understood without AI next time. Before anything is stored, passwords, keys, emails, addresses and IDs are removed, and your station and show names are replaced by placeholders. You are counted by a one-way pseudonym, never by your Discord or MAWCast ID, and names it learns for your own stations and shows apply to your account only.

What it will tell you about

You choose from the list below. Anything you leave unticked, it stays quiet about, and you can switch the lot off without disconnecting it.

Broadcast reminders

How long before a reminder arrives is set on the programme itself, in Control, when you create it — up to two reminders per show, from 30 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day before. The assistant does not ask you again: a second place to answer the same question is a second answer the day they disagree.

What you choose in the assistant is only whether to receive them at all. A repeating programme reminds you every time it airs, and a week you cancelled reminds you about nothing.

What it will never ask you for

Passwords, stream passwords, API keys and card details. Not once, not for support, not for any reason. Anything to do with billing lives in MAWCast Control and the assistant links you there rather than handling it.

What it is for

MAW Assistant helps you run your station: listeners, what is playing, the schedule, AutoDJ, your stream and encoder, notifications and your plan. It also answers the broadcasting questions around it — bitrates, codecs, Icecast, connecting your encoder — from this documentation first.

It is not a general-purpose assistant. It will answer the odd short question about something else, and after that it points you back to your station rather than answering more. Essays, stories, homework and long explanations of general topics are not something it writes, on any plan.

It never creates, edits or analyses images — logos, covers, banners, photos or anything else — on any plan, including plans with MAW Assistant AI. Your station’s own logo and images are uploaded in MAWCast Control.

What it will never tell you

The same goes the other way. The assistant does not show stream passwords, keys, tokens or anything that works like one — not to the account owner, not encoded, not a few characters at a time. Your stream credentials live in Control → Stations, behind your MAWCast sign-in, and the assistant sends you there with a button.

It also keeps MAWCast’s own machinery to itself: server addresses, internal names, storage paths, versions and how its protections work. What it does tell you is what you need — whether your station is live, whether audio is arriving, what is scheduled next. It only ever talks about stations, shows and playlists on your own account; one that belongs to someone else looks exactly like one that does not exist.

If you ask for one of these things it says so plainly and offers what it can do instead. It does not assume anything about why you asked.

Turning it off

/maw → Settings → Account → Disconnect. It forgets your preferences here. It does not touch your MAWCast account, your stations or your subscription.