The help assistant answers questions about Terrarium from inside your dashboard. It's off until you turn it on, and each person in a household turns it on for themselves.
Turn it on or off
Press Ask for help at the bottom right of your dashboard. The first time, Terrarium asks before turning it on. To turn it off, open Settings and find Help assistant.
What it knows
The assistant answers from these help articles and a summary of the setup of the household you're looking at, such as its apps, whether each one is ready or has an update waiting, how much storage it uses, its plan, and whether you own it. If you're a household member, it knows that you can't install or remove apps. For how something works inside an app, such as importing a recipe in Mealie, it reads that app's own documentation when Terrarium includes it. Otherwise it uses what it knows about the app in general. Either way, it says where the answer came from.
It can't change anything. When something needs doing, it tells you where to click.
Its answers can be wrong. For anything important, check the articles here or get in touch.
Messages to the team
When you want to tell the people who run Terrarium something, the assistant can write the message for you. It shows the draft under its answer with Send and Edit buttons. Nothing is sent until you press Send, and Edit lets you change it first.
The assistant writes the draft from your conversation. When you send it, Terrarium emails it to the team with your email address and username added, so a person can reply. The assistant never sees your email address, and sending doesn't go through OpenRouter.
What it sends
With each question, Terrarium sends:
- your conversation, including your question
- the summary of this household's setup, as it was when you sent each question in the conversation
Each person's setting covers only their own questions. A household member who turns it on sends the summary of the household they're asking about, even if its owner has it off.
It never sends your email address, username or passwords, or anything inside your apps, such as your music, notes or recipes.
Where your conversation goes
Terrarium sends your conversation to OpenRouter, which passes it to Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic and run by Amazon or Google. Terrarium only uses providers that have agreed not to keep your messages or use them for training. OpenRouter may keep an occasional sample, with nothing that identifies you, to sort questions by topic.
What's kept
Terrarium doesn't keep your conversations. A conversation lasts until you reload the page, close the tab or press New conversation. Switching to another household starts a new one too.