BranchSiteBack to Home

Assistant settings and usage

Settings → Assistant: who can use it, whether it may propose changes, privacy and retention, voice and Talk, Today thresholds, the monthly allowance, Talk usage, and the activity log.

Settings → Assistant needs the settings.manage permission. It has seven sections. Availability, Actions, Privacy, Voice and Today thresholds save together with the Update Settings bar; Usage and Activity are read-only views with their own actions.

Availability

  • Enable the assistant turns the panel on or off for the whole account.
  • Roles allowed lists the roles that see the panel. Vendors are never included. A user whose role is removed here loses the panel on their next page load.
  • Crew mode on My Day switches the assistant to the crew tool set on My Day for every role. Crew-role users are in crew mode everywhere regardless of this setting.

Actions

  • Allow proposed changes lets the assistant produce proposal cards. It is on by default on Plus and Premier and not available on Essential; on Essential the assistant still answers, opens screens, and drafts, and shows an upgrade note where a proposal would appear.
  • Deep mode (Premier) lets a user switch a thread to the largest model for long, multi-step questions. It is off by default.

The section also lists what stays manual on every plan: sending to clients, payments and refunds, approving jobs, QuickBooks sync, merges, deletes, and every settings, role, billing, or automation change.

Privacy

  • Require zero-data-retention models routes every text chat request to models that keep no prompts or outputs. With this on, deep mode uses the standard model. Where the Voice section offers Voice privacy, voice follows that choice instead; see below.
  • Keep threads for (days) sets how long conversations are kept, 30 to 365. A nightly job deletes older threads for the account; the activity log is not affected.
  • Purge all threads deletes every conversation in the account now, after a confirmation. Approved changes and their undo state are kept.

Voice

  • Voice in the office assistant turns office dictation and Talk on for the account. It also needs BranchSite preview access. Approvals still need a tap, and crew voice notes on My Day have their own controls.

When hands-free Talk is available for the workspace, five more settings appear. They are account-wide defaults for everyone who uses Talk:

  • Assistant voice — the voice replies are read in. The list depends on Voice privacy.
  • When should it answer? — how long a pause ends your turn: Wait for me (about 1.2 seconds, for people who think mid-sentence), Balanced (about 0.8 seconds, the default) or Quick (about 0.5 seconds).
  • Let me interrupt — on by default: talking over the assistant stops its reply. Turn it off if replies play on speakers in a noisy room, where a TV or another voice could interrupt it.
  • End Talk after silence — 30 seconds, 1 minute (the default) or 2 minutes with no speech.
  • Voice privacy — Best quality uses OpenAI voice models, which are not covered by zero data retention; a caveat says so while it is selected. Zero data retention uses xAI Grok voice models; live words appear in larger steps, and office dictation may be unavailable. Turning on Require zero-data-retention models switches Voice privacy to Zero data retention to match. You can switch back, and the caveat stays visible.

Voice settings change nothing for text chat. See Office dictation, Talk, and privacy for how Talk works and what it sends.

Today thresholds

Today is the list at the top of the panel: stale leads, unscheduled approved work, overdue invoices, renewals coming due, and similar. Each rule has a threshold — a number of days or a minimum amount — that decides when an item qualifies. Set them here per account. Owners can also opt into a daily digest of the same list in Notifications.

Usage

The meter shows this month's turns against the account's allowance (300 on Essential, 1,500 on Plus, 5,000 on Premier). A turn is one message from a user and the assistant's reply, however many tools it called. At 80 percent the panel warns; at 100 percent the assistant pauses until the first of the next month. The table below the meter breaks the month down by user with tokens and an estimated cost, and Export CSV downloads it.

For assistant chat, the month boundary is calendar UTC; a turn sent in the last hour of the month in a western time zone may count toward the next month.

Office dictation has a separate seven-account-calendar-day card with attempts, outcomes, known duration, and cost coverage. Unknown cost is not free. Its reported cost is already in the monthly feature table; do not add the two views. Historical aggregates remain after attempt cleanup and cannot establish older cost completeness. See Office dictation, Talk, and privacy for recording, recovery, account-calendar reporting and the separate UTC daily allowance.

Talk this month shows Talk sessions, listening minutes, spoken characters and speech cost, with a day-by-day table and Export Talk CSV. The AI service reports no cost for live listening. The listening figure is therefore an estimate from the measured seconds at the rate for the current Voice privacy setting. It is marked "not reported", is not a bill, and is never shown as $0. Speech cost for spoken replies is reported by the service. Session counts come from each browser and can miss a session whose tab closed before it reported. Listening that never settled, for example when a tab closed mid-turn, is not included. Talk figures use the account's calendar days, while the daily listening and speaking allowances reset at midnight UTC, so the two can disagree near midnight and at the start or end of a month.

Activity

The log lists every proposal the assistant made in the account: when, who, which tool, the records it named, and its status (proposed, approved, cancelled, done, failed, undone). Filter by tool, status, and date. Where a change is still inside its undo window an Undo button appears; undo runs as you and is logged as a second entry.

Turning it off entirely

Disabling the assistant in Availability hides the panel and the top-bar button for everyone in the account. Stored threads are kept until their retention date unless you purge them.