AI Assistant

The AI Assistant is a built-in chat window inside Truetask. Ask it questions about the board you're looking at, tell it to create or update tasks, ask it to summarize a long thread, or get insights about your team's workload — all without leaving the app.

Enterprise only

The in-app AI Assistant requires an Enterprise license and an AI endpoint configured by your administrator in Settings → Integrations → AI. If you don't see the chat icon in the toolbar, it hasn't been enabled yet.

Opening the Chat

Click the chat icon (a speech bubble) in the top toolbar. A floating window opens in the bottom-right corner of the screen — draggable, resizable, and minimizable.

• Drag the window header to reposition it
• Drag the corner to resize
• Minimize to keep it out of the way while you work
• Close to end the conversation (history is kept during your session)

What the Assistant Can Do

The AI has access to the board you currently have open, and the broader scope of every board you're a member of. It can:

Read and answer questions

• "What's on my plate this week?"
• "Show me all overdue tasks in the Frontend board."
• "Who's working on the payment integration?"
• "How many tasks did we complete last sprint?"

Create and modify tasks

• "Create a task called 'Review PR #234' in the In Progress list, assign it to me, set priority to high."
• "Move the database migration task to Done."
• "Add a checklist to the onboarding task with items for accounts, docs, and access."
• "Set all tasks tagged 'blocker' to high priority."

Summarize content

• "Summarize the comments on the current task."
• "Give me a status update for this board."
• "What's been happening on the marketing board this week?"

Manage time

• "Start a timer on the current task."
• "How much time did I log today?"
• "Log 45 minutes on the planning task from earlier this morning."

Work across boards

• "What's the priority breakdown across all my boards?"
• "Which boards have tasks due tomorrow?"

How It Sees Your Data

The assistant uses the same permission model as your user account — it can only see and modify what you have access to. If you're a Viewer on a board, the assistant can read it but not change anything there; if you're an Editor, it can work on tasks but not manage the board itself.

Destructive operations (deleting boards, lists, or large sets of data) have safety guardrails built in — the assistant will preview the action and ask for confirmation before proceeding.

Where Your Data Goes

AI requests go from your Truetask instance directly to the AI endpoint your administrator configured — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, a local Ollama installation, or any compatible service. Your data does not pass through Truetask's servers or any third-party service.

The assistant and the standalone AI actions (including agent_loop and the inline helpers described below) work with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Ollama — pick whichever provider your admin has wired up.

If your admin configured a self-hosted model (like Ollama or LM Studio), your data stays entirely on your own infrastructure.

Board Context

Every board can carry a short context blob that gets prepended to every AI prompt run against it — so the assistant knows what the board is for, what kind of tasks live on it, and how you like things written.

Open it from the board's overflow (three-dot) menu → AI Context. The dialog opens as a full-width workspace with three editable fields:

Field	What goes here
Purpose	One or two sentences on what the board is for and who works on it
Tasks	What a typical task on this board looks like — type, scope, vocabulary
Preferences	How you want the AI to behave — tone, format, defaults, things to avoid

Each field is an auto-growing textarea with a manual resize handle in the corner — drag it taller if you want more room.

Templates

The Templates dropdown at the top of the dialog seeds all three fields with editable starter text. Five starting points are included:

• Marketing
• Product / Engineering
• Operations / Back-office
• Design / Creative
• Blank — start from scratch

Pick the closest one, then edit. Templates only overwrite empty fields by default, so you can swap templates without losing what you've already written.

Suggest from board

Click Suggest from board to have the AI draft a context based on the board's name and recent task titles. Review the result and edit before saving — it's a starting point, not a verdict.

Per-section help

A small (i) icon next to each section label opens a tooltip with a one-sentence "what makes a good Purpose / Tasks / Preferences" hint and a concrete example.

Live preview

Expand the collapsible What the AI sees panel at the bottom to see the assembled Purpose: … Tasks: … Preferences: … string exactly as it gets prepended to AI prompts. Useful for spotting redundancy or stray formatting.

Counter and save state

A character counter sits at the bottom of the dialog. Past 1500 characters a soft warning appears — "Context is long — every AI call sends this" — because the same blob ships with every request and adds up across the day.

The Save button is disabled until you've actually changed something.

Inline AI Title Suggestions

When typing a new task title in the kanban add-card flow, three alternative phrasings appear in a popover above the input. Keyboard support, refresh, and the workspace toggle for disabling it are documented in Kanban View → Creating a Task.

Conversation History

Conversations persist for the duration of your session. Opening and closing the chat window preserves your history. Signing out or refreshing the page starts a new conversation.

Differences from the MCP Integration

Truetask has two AI features that sound similar but serve different purposes:

Feature	What it does	Where you use it
AI Assistant (this page)	Built-in chat window inside Truetask using your configured AI endpoint	Inside Truetask
MCP Integration	Lets external AI tools (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) read and modify your Truetask data	Inside your AI tool

Both can do similar things — read and manage your boards. Use the AI Assistant when you want AI help without leaving Truetask, and MCP when you want your external AI tool of choice to work with Truetask data.

See Connect AI Assistant (MCP) for the MCP integration guide.

Tips

• Be specific about the board or list — "in the Backlog list" is clearer than "over there"
• Use @mentions in your messages — the assistant understands them just like humans do
• The assistant remembers the conversation — ask follow-up questions without repeating context
• If a response isn't quite right, ask it to try again or reword your request
• Start small — ask it to list tasks or summarize before trusting it with create/update operations