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Assistant · beta

Ask your NAS, in plain words

"Is anything about my storage worth worrying about?" is a question that otherwise means opening four screens. The assistant reads what your NAS reported and answers it - with a model running on your phone, offline, that never sends anything anywhere.

The assistant, ready with suggested questions
Asking

Type it or say it

The Assistant tab has two sub-views: Ask, and How it works. Ask opens with four suggestions, which are there to show the shape of a good question rather than to limit you.

The model is loaded when you open the screen, not when you send the first question, so the first answer is not the slowest one.
Scope

There is no list of topics

This is the part that is easy to miss. The assistant is not a set of canned answers about storage and backups - it is pointed at whatever your NAS actually publishes.

Good questions look like questions. "How is my NAS doing?", "Are my backups healthy?", "What is using the most space?", "What can you see about this NAS?" - the last one is worth asking once, because the answer tells you what it can reach on your NAS.
Privacy

Nothing leaves the phone

The model belongs to the device. Your question, your NAS's data and the answer are all handled on the phone, and it works with the network switched off.

  • There is no cloud tier to fall back to. Not "we choose not to use one" - the app's build fails if a cloud host, a cloud SDK or an API key appears anywhere in the assistant. The promise is kept by the build, not by anybody remembering.
  • Because nothing is transmitted, there is no copy to store, share, or train anything on.
  • It is free and needs no account, because the model is already on your device.
How it works, explaining that the model is on the device and no data leaves it
Boundaries

It only ever reads

The assistant cannot start, stop, delete or restart anything. Not because it has been asked nicely not to - because it is not given those tools in the first place.

That matters more than it sounds. A model that is instructed not to do something can be talked into doing it. A model that has no way to do it cannot. If you want to restart a container, the Docker screen is three taps away and it will ask you to confirm.

Honesty

It can be wrong, and the screen says so

This is a small model running on a phone, not a large one in a data centre. It can misread a number or sound more certain than it should. The app says this on the screen rather than in a footnote.

Availability

Which devices have it

PlatformModelRequirement
AndroidGemini NanoA device with AICore and a Gemini Nano model available to it.
iOS and macOSApple IntelligenceA device where Apple Intelligence is supported and enabled.
Anything else-The tab is not shown at all.
A device without a usable model does not show the feature. Not greyed out, not a teaser - absent. A control that cannot work is worse than no control, so the tab simply is not there.

The How it works sub-view tells you which state your own device is in, and what it found.

Common questions

Assistant FAQ

Where does the assistant run?
On your phone. Gemini Nano through AICore on Android, Apple Intelligence on iOS and macOS. There is no cloud tier to fall back to - the app's build fails if a cloud host, a cloud SDK or an API key appears anywhere in the assistant.
Does my NAS data get sent anywhere?
No. Your question, your NAS's data and the answer never leave the device, and it works with the network switched off. Because nothing is transmitted, there is no copy to store, share or train on.
What can I ask it?
There is no fixed list. Your NAS publishes everything it can report - over a thousand entries on a typical one - and the assistant searches that. Install a package and it can answer about that too, with no app update.
Can it change anything on my NAS?
No. It only ever reads. It cannot start, stop, delete or restart anything - because it is not given those tools.
Does it cost anything?
No. It uses the model already built into your device, so there is nothing to pay and no account to make.
Why can I not see the Assistant tab?
Because the device has no usable on-device model. Rather than showing a feature that cannot work, the app hides it entirely on hardware that cannot run it.

Next: Settings

Every preference the app has, and what each one changes.

Settings →   Back to the guide