Ask Pocketbird — the on-device chat

You have months of transactions on the phone, and the thing you actually want to know is rarely a screen — "how much did I spend on food this cycle?", "who do I owe?", "which shop takes the most of my money?". Ask Pocketbird is a chat where you type that question in Thai or English and get the number back.

Two things make it different from a search box. It can write as well as read — tell it to log a purchase and it prepares a transaction for you to approve. And the conversation stays on the phone: your question, the text read off a receipt, and every figure it computes.

• Nothing about your question is uploaded. The only network call this screen can cause is the ordinary sync that runs after you tap Save on a confirmation card, so the saved row reaches your other devices like any other transaction.
• The assistant is instructed never to invent, extrapolate or estimate a number — it answers from your data or says briefly that it can't.
• It replies in whichever language you wrote in, and treats every amount as Thai Baht.

There is exactly one door into Ask Pocketbird, and it is a row inside a card rather than a tab of its own.

1. 1Open the "Summary" / "สรุป" tab — the third slot in the default iPhone tab bar, or a row in the iPad sidebar.
2. 2Scroll down the dashboard to the "Insights" / "ข้อมูลเชิงลึก" card.
3. 3Tap its last row — "Ask Pocketbird" / "ถาม Pocketbird", with the speech-bubble icon.

• If you have moved Summary out of the tab bar into the More hub, the path becomes More → Summary → Insights card → Ask Pocketbird. Only Transactions is pinned to the bar; everything else can be moved.
• You must be signed in — like every other feature, Ask Pocketbird sits behind login.

What you get depends on the phone. When Apple's on-device model is available, you get the full chat. When it isn't — the iPhone doesn't support Apple Intelligence, it is switched off, or the model is still downloading — the same row opens a simpler keyword screen instead: one question, one sentence back.

• The chat holds a conversation, looks your data up through nine built-in tools, reads receipts, and prepares transactions with a tenth.
• The keyword screen answers "how much did I spend…" style questions only. No follow-ups, no attachments, no logging.
• The switch is silent — no banner, no error, and no setting to force one engine or the other.
• The two layouts advertise different example questions, because the keyword engine genuinely cannot parse the chat-only ones.

1. 1Tap the field at the bottom — placeholder "Ask, or add a transaction…" / "ถาม หรือเพิ่มรายการ…".
2. 2Type your question in Thai or English.
3. 3Tap the circled up-arrow ("Send question" / "ส่งคำถาม"), or press the keyboard's Send key.
4. 4The reply types itself out next to a small bird, and the transcript scrolls to keep up.

• The privacy line, the chips and the insight rows only exist while the transcript is empty. Your first message replaces all of them for the rest of the visit.
• Follow-ups work inside one visit — ask "how much on food this cycle?" and then only "and last cycle?".
• While the assistant is working, the left-hand bubble is an animated row of dots; VoiceOver reads it as "Thinking…" / "กำลังคิด…".
• The phone buzzes once when you send, not when the answer lands — the haptic is tied to the transcript growing, and a send adds both your bubble and the empty reply at the same moment.
• The conversation is not saved. Leaving the screen throws the transcript away — there is no history and no "new chat" button; going back and re-entering is how you start over.
• If the model errors or comes back empty, the pending bubble becomes "Sorry, I couldn't answer that just now. Please try again." / "ขออภัย ตอบคำถามนี้ตอนนี้ไม่ได้ กรุณาลองใหม่อีกครั้ง" in the warning colour. There is no retry button — send the question again yourself.

On your first message of a visit the app takes a read-only snapshot of your data and hands the assistant ten built-in tools over it. All ten run on the phone.

• Individual purchases — "what did I buy on Saturday", "my biggest expenses this month".
• Totals — "how much did I spend", "how much on food", "am I over budget".
• Accounts — "how much money do I have", "my <bank> balance", "what's my net worth".
• Pockets — "how much have I saved", "progress on <goal>".
• Debts — "how much do I owe", "who owes me", "when is <debt> due".
• Recurring bills — "what subscriptions do I have", "what's due next".
• People — "how much have I paid <person>", "who do I spend the most on".
• Budgets — "how much budget is left for <category>".
• Trips — "how much did <trip> cost", "how much per day".
• And one tool that writes — preparing a transaction for you to approve, covered in the next section.

Ask without naming a period and you get the current budget cycle. Name one and the assistant can request today, yesterday, this week, this month, last month, this cycle, last cycle, or all time.

• "This week" means the last 7 days including today, not Monday to Sunday.
• "This cycle" and "last cycle" follow your payday cycle — your payday, your weekend adjustment, any per-cycle start override, and your holiday calendar.
• A list of transactions comes back 20 rows at a time by default, and the assistant can raise that to 50 at most. Each row shows the rolled-up category in square brackets and the person in parentheses.
• A spending summary comes back as total expense, total income, net, the top 8 expense categories, and every budget for the cycle with its spent-of-limit.

The limits are worth knowing before you trust an answer.

• There is no account filter and no search inside notes, and the account name is not printed on the rows — so "what did I spend on my SCB card" cannot be answered directly. A merchant works only if you keep it as a category or as a person.
• It cannot see your stored monthly salary, a pocket's target date, an account's credit limit or statement due day, or a debt's due day — only the computed next due date.
• Trip answers are the least dependable of the ten: the trips tool works, but it is not named in the assistant's instruction list, so it may not think to reach for it.
• Deleted rows never appear. Paused, inactive and transfer recurring rules are left out, archived accounts are left out, and people with no money activity at all are left out.

Say "Log a ฿60 coffee" / "บันทึกค่ากาแฟ 60 บาท" and the assistant prepares a transaction — it does not save one. A card appears under the reply, and nothing is written to your ledger until you tap Save.

1. 1Type what you spent, in either language, and send.
2. 2Read the card: amount, direction, note, category and date.
3. 3Tap "Save" / "บันทึก" to write it, or "Dismiss" / "ปิด" to throw the draft away.
4. 4After a successful save the buttons become "Added" / "บันทึกแล้ว" with a green check and the phone gives a success haptic; a failed save gives an error haptic instead.

• Leaving the screen discards an un-saved proposal — the draft lives only in memory.
• A card can be saved once, and Dismiss removes it for good. The assistant may propose several transactions in one turn — from a statement, say — and each card is saved or dismissed on its own.
• Every save from chat records the digital payment source, so it never moves your cash-on-hand figure.
• The category is re-checked when you tap Save and dropped if it is no longer a live personal category of the right type — so a card can save with no category even though the card showed one.
• Saving syncs the row to your other devices and refreshes your home-screen widgets.

The paperclip beside the message field takes a receipt or slip photo, or a PDF such as a bank statement or an e-receipt. The phone extracts the text — Vision OCR for images, PDFKit for PDFs — and the assistant turns what it reads into confirmation cards.

1. 1Tap the paperclip ("Attach a receipt or PDF" / "แนบใบเสร็จหรือ PDF").
2. 2Choose "Photo" / "รูปภาพ" — images only — or "PDF file" / "ไฟล์ PDF".
3. 3"Reading attachment…" / "กำลังอ่านไฟล์แนบ…" appears with a spinner while the text is extracted on the phone.
4. 4Your bubble shows a thumbnail of what you sent, and the reply carries one confirmation card per transaction it read.
5. 5Save or dismiss each card the same way as a typed one.

• The thumbnail kept in the transcript is a small JPEG downscaled to a 320 pt longest edge, drawn at most 200 × 240 pt in the bubble. For a PDF it is the first page. The full-resolution file is not kept.
• With no caption and no usable thumbnail, the bubble falls back to "📎 Receipt photo" / "📎 รูปใบเสร็จ" or "📎 PDF document" / "📎 เอกสาร PDF".
• The paperclip is disabled while a reply is streaming or while a previous attachment is still being read.

Below the starter chips the screen also lists the app's coaching lines for the current pay cycle — plain sentences with an icon, warnings in the warning colour and good news in the income colour. In the chat layout they are part of the empty state and disappear once you send a message; on the keyword screen they sit in a permanent "Insights" / "ข้อมูลเชิงลึก" section.

• Uncategorized cleanup — fires when uncategorized spending reaches 40% of the cycle's expenses, and names the count and the share.
• Overspend pace — projects where the cycle is heading against your budget or income. It waits until more than 10% of the cycle has elapsed, so a single big day on payday doesn't set it off.
• A category up — needs that category to be at least ฿500 this cycle and at least 20% higher than last cycle.
• A category down — needs at least ฿500 last cycle and a drop of at least 20%.
• Your biggest category — needs at least 2 rolled-up categories and a share of at least 25% of expenses.
• Savings rate — either how much more you spent than you earned, or praise for keeping 20% or more of the cycle's income. Both need real logged income.
• No-spend days — appears once you have at least 3 days in the cycle with nothing logged.

• The first 4 of these lines are folded into the assistant's briefing, so the chat already knows what the screen is telling you and can talk about it.
• These lines are computed over your whole personal ledger — the 2,000-row cap applies only to what the assistant's tools can see.

Without the on-device model you still get a working Ask Pocketbird — a single-shot question and answer, matched on keywords rather than understood. It is narrow on purpose, and it would rather refuse than guess.

1. 1Type into the field "Ask about your spending…" / "ถามเรื่องการใช้เงินของคุณ…", or tap a chip under "Try Asking" / "ลองถามดู".
2. 2Tap the paper-plane button ("Send question" / "ส่งคำถาม") or submit from the keyboard.
3. 3The answer appears directly below, next to a bird glyph. With VoiceOver on it is announced aloud, because a list row does not take focus by itself.

• The balance answer ignores the period and the category on purpose — it is the all-time signed total of your personal transactions, the same figure as the home header.
• Asking about a parent category includes its subcategories, matching the Summary rollup; asking about a subcategory stays narrow.
• Shop and business transactions are excluded here too.
• Only one answer is on screen at a time — asking again replaces it. There are no attachments, no follow-ups and no transaction creation on this layout.
• Its four chips are "How much did I spend this month?" / "เดือนนี้ใช้ไปเท่าไหร่", "How much on food this cycle?" / "รอบนี้กินข้าวไปเท่าไหร่", "How much did I earn this cycle?" / "รอบนี้ได้เงินเท่าไหร่", and "How much on shopping this week?" / "ช้อปปิ้งสัปดาห์นี้เท่าไหร่".
• The section footer never changes: "Pocketbird answers from the data on this device — questions never leave your phone." / "Pocketbird ตอบจากข้อมูลบนเครื่องนี้เท่านั้น — คำถามไม่ถูกส่งออกจากเครื่องของคุณ"