AI Assistant
The Assistant is a right-side pane version of Bitment's AI that knows what you're looking at. Where Chat is a standalone conversation you open on its own, the Assistant rides alongside whatever app and record you already have open, so you can ask it about the thing on your screen without describing it first, and it can move your view, fill in a field, or stage a change right where you'd make it by hand.
Think of it as "you, with an assistant looking over your shoulder": it acts with your own permissions, and by default it can only ever propose a change, never commit one, until you say otherwise.
Where to find it
Open the Assistant from the AI control in the top menu bar, or press ⌥ Option+A (also ⇧ Shift+⌥ Option+A, and ⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+A in the desktop app) from anywhere in Bitment. It opens as a pane beside your current window rather than taking it over.
Key concepts
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Page context | What app and record the Assistant currently sees you looking at. It updates as you switch views. |
| Proposal | A staged change the Assistant prepares, reviewed as a card in the pane before it takes effect. |
| Navigation | The Assistant moving your view to a screen, opening an app tab, or highlighting a control, in response to what you asked. |
| Field insert | The Assistant placing approved text into a real field (like a reply body) once you approve it, rather than typing it in unapproved. |
| Elevated session | A conversation where you've explicitly allowed a specific capability to commit directly instead of only proposing. |
How it differs from Chat
Chat and the Assistant share the same underlying tools, models, and proposal review. The Assistant adds one thing Chat doesn't have: awareness of your current screen, plus the ability to act on it directly.
| Chat | Assistant | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it opens | Its own app/tab | A pane beside whatever you have open |
| Knows what you're looking at | No | Yes |
| Can move your view / open a screen | No | Yes |
| Tools, models, proposals | Same | Same |
A Chat conversation and an Assistant conversation share one history: a conversation started in Chat can be opened and continued from the Assistant pane, and vice versa, so switching between the two never splits your work into two threads.
Ask about what you're looking at
Open the pane while you have something open, an email thread, a client, a calendar day, and just ask about it. The Assistant already has that context, the same way a colleague looking at your screen would, so you don't have to name the record first.
Let it navigate for you
Ask the Assistant to take you somewhere ("show me last month's unpaid invoices", "open Northwind LLC's file") and it moves a visible cursor to the real control and opens the view, the same as if you'd clicked there yourself. This is pure navigation: nothing about your data changes just because the Assistant moved your view.
Stage changes for approval
Anything the Assistant would change is staged as a proposal, exactly like Chat: a card appears in the pane showing exactly what would happen, an editable email draft, a task, or a full field-by-field breakdown for anything else. Nothing takes effect until you click Approve. Reject discards it.
A text proposal (say, a suggested reply) works the same way: the Assistant never writes into the real field until you approve the card, at which point the approved text is inserted into the actual composer for you to send yourself.
Elevate a session to let it commit directly
If you'd rather not review every single step for a particular kind of change, you can elevate the current conversation for a specific capability from the composer's execute-mode control. Once elevated, the Assistant commits that capability's changes itself during the turn instead of only proposing them, and still shows you what it did. Elevation is scoped to the one conversation, is capability-specific (elevating one thing never grants another), and expires automatically after a few hours, after which the Assistant quietly returns to propose-only for that capability until you elevate it again.
Attach files and use voice
The Assistant shares the same composer as Chat: attach documents, spreadsheets, images, and PDFs, or paste a screenshot directly with Cmd+V / Ctrl+V. On a phone or tablet, the attach button also offers Take Photo, Record Video, and Photo Library. You can dictate into the composer the same way you can anywhere else in Bitment; see Settings › Voice-to-Text.
Export and review
The pane's header carries the same export as PDF control every AI surface has, for saving a transcript of what the Assistant did or discussed. A terminal-icon audit toggle in the header reveals the conversation's ID and running AI cost, and, per message, exactly what the Assistant looked up or called to answer.