AI Assistant
Chronoid includes a built-in AI assistant for conversations about your tracked time. Questions, follow-ups, attachments, and changes to your projects and rules all happen in one place. Open it from AI Assistant, the first item in the sidebar.
Before You Start
- Open Settings → AI Providers and add at least one provider.
- Make sure your tracking data is already in Chronoid so the assistant has something useful to work with.
The bar under the message box shows which provider and model the chat uses. Switch either one there, or click the settings button next to them to open Settings → AI Providers. Picking a model here also makes it that provider’s default model.
If you have not configured a provider yet, start with AI Providers.
What You Can Do
- Answering questions about time worked, projects, distractions, and activity breakdowns
- Summarizing a day, week, or custom date range
- Helping you understand billing or invoice-related totals
- Suggesting or applying updates to time entries when the provider supports tool use
- Attaching screenshots or files when extra context helps
- Continuing a conversation with follow-up questions
- Auditing your rules for duplicates or rules that match too much
Common Prompts
- “How much time did I spend on client work this week?”
- “Show my longest focused session today.”
- “Summarize my distractions from yesterday.”
- “Find unassigned work from this morning.”
- “Update that meeting block to the Design project.”
- “Compare this week’s work hours with last week.”
- “Look at this screenshot and tell me what project it belongs to.”
Workflows
The ⚡ button next to the message box runs ready-made workflows on your tracked time:
- Daily Review
- Standup Notes
- Weekly Review
- Prepare Invoice
- Clean Up Time Data
They are a quick way to get a useful answer without writing a prompt.
Approving Changes
When the assistant wants to change something, such as creating a project, assigning activity, adding a rule, or logging a time entry, it shows an Approve / Deny card first. The card says what will change and how much activity it affects. Nothing is written until you click Approve. If you click Deny, the assistant is told that nothing changed.
You can expand the steps above each answer to see every lookup and change the assistant made, with its input and result.
A single request can take up to 12 steps. If a job needs more, click Continue.
Conversation Flow
The assistant keeps context within the current conversation, so you can ask follow-up questions without starting over.
- “How much time did I spend on Project X this week?”
- “What about last week?”
- “Break it down by day.”
Chronoid keeps one conversation and remembers it across restarts. When you want a clean start, click the trash button (Clear chat) at the top right. Clearing also makes answers faster on local models, since there is less history to reread.
You can also copy, regenerate, or edit a message, and retry an answer that failed.
Attachments
Attachments are part of AI Assistant.
Typical uses:
- screenshots
- exported reports
- reference images
- other files that help explain what you want the assistant to analyze
Typical workflow:
- Open AI Assistant in Chronoid.
- Attach the relevant file or media.
- Add your question or instruction.
- Review the response and continue with follow-up prompts if needed.
Images are sent to the model for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral AI, and Together AI. With other providers, and for images over 10 MB, the model only sees the file name and type. Audio and video are always attached by name and type only.
Tips:
- Add a short explanation with each attachment so the assistant knows what to focus on.
- Use attachments when a text-only prompt would be ambiguous or slower to explain.
- Keep sensitive material in mind if you are using a cloud provider.
How It Works
Chronoid sends your prompt to the provider you selected. The assistant then calls Chronoid tools to query or update local data instead of relying only on text generation. Apple Intelligence can use the read-only tools but cannot make changes. With an Agent CLI, only Claude Code and Codex get tool access.
That usually means:
- Better date and project lookups
- More reliable billing answers
- Less manual searching through reports
Privacy Notes
Chronoid is designed around local data. Your tracked database stays on your Mac, but prompts, attachments, and tool results needed to answer your request may be sent to the provider you enabled.
If you want more control:
- Use a local provider such as Ollama or LM Studio
- Review AI Providers before enabling cloud services
- Avoid sharing prompts that contain information you do not want sent to the selected model
Related Guides
For help, email support@chronoid.app