Quick answer
- My Assistant answers questions against your own inventory, pricing and storage data.
- On the web, an empty chat offers starter cards: ready questions, with the ones that suit your role first.
- Prefer talking to typing? Keyboard dictation works in the message box.
- On your phone, open More and tap My Assistant under Tasting.
- On the web, Ask support at the top of the chat answers questions about how Vinius works from this help centre, with its sources, and can prepare a support request that you confirm.
- Two monthly limits apply: your own, counted across all your organizations, and your organization's total, shared by the team. Both reset on the 1st of each month.
- The line under the message box shows how many messages you have left.
- The answers come from AI and can be wrong. Check anything important before you act on it.
What it is grounded in
My Assistant is not a general chatbot with a wine theme. When the data is available it reads your organization's context: inventory, profile, storage and pricing signals, plus any custom instructions you have set. On the web, the gear at the top of the chat opens Personalize Assistant: you write your instructions there, and Context already sent automatically lists the profile details that go with every question.
Where data is thin, it says so. If stock levels, storage detail or pricing context are incomplete, it will tell you rather than sounding more certain than the data allows. Treat that as a feature: a confident answer about stock you never entered is worse than no answer.
It only uses what your role lets you see. The wines, stock and prices come from the sites you have access to, so a staff member gets no purchase prices in an answer.
Answers can be wrong
AI writes the answers. They can be wrong or incomplete, even when they read well: a stock figure, a price, a drinking window, a step in Vinius. Check anything important in Vinius itself before you order, price or pour on the strength of it.
How it frames answers
On the web, My Assistant aims its answers at the work your role does. In a venue, owners, admins and managers get answers framed for purchasing, and staff and viewers get answers framed for service. A personal account gets the cellar framing. There is no setting to pick a framing yourself. The framing changes the angle of an answer, not the data behind it.
| Framing | What it focuses on |
|---|---|
| Service | Quick, guest-friendly answers from the wines in stock at your site, with serving notes |
| Purchasing | What runs low, stock rotation, reorder suggestions, suppliers and the prices you may see |
| Cellar | Stock balance, storage, drinking windows, what to open now and what to keep |
| Training | Clear explanations, terms defined simply, one point to remember |
A starter card brings its own framing, for that one question. Your next question, and Improve answer, go back to the framing for your role. If an answer seems aimed at the wrong audience, say who it is for in the question.
Starter cards
An empty chat on the web shows six starter cards. The ones that match your role's framing come first. The full set:
- Build a pre-service wine briefing for tonight
- Create a pairing flight using wines we should move now
- Which wines are at low-stock risk right now?
- Suggest BTG wines that help move stock this week
- What should we pour now versus hold in the cellar?
- Where are the biggest cellar concentration or storage risks?
- Give me a 5-minute staff training topic from our current list
- Teach the team how to explain a style on our list better
Tapping a card sends its question at once. You can also ask ordinary wine questions: styles, regions, serving temperatures, glassware, decanting, ageing windows, or simply where a wine is stored.
Conversations are saved, so you can reopen a briefing rather than rebuilding it.
Talk instead of type
The message box takes dictation from your keyboard, which helps when your hands are full during service.
- In the Vinius app, or in a browser on a phone or tablet, tap the microphone on the keyboard and speak.
- On a computer, use the dictation built into macOS or Windows. On Windows, press the Windows key + H.
Read the text before you send it. Dictation can mishear grape varieties, producers and place names, and the assistant answers what it reads. A message holds up to 4,000 characters; a counter appears as you get close.
On your phone
In the Vinius app, open More and tap My Assistant under Tasting. The tile is there for every role, but not on a tablet that shows the digital wine card in kiosk mode.
The first time, Before you start explains what the assistant does, that answers can be wrong and what it uses, with one line saying that Vinius sends this to OpenAI and a link to the privacy policy. In short: Vinius sends your question, with the wines, stock and prices you can see at your sites, to OpenAI to write the answer. OpenAI does not use it to train its models and deletes it within 30 days, and Vinius saves the conversation in your account. Tap Agree and continue to start, or Not now.
- Ask in the message box, by typing or with the keyboard's microphone.
- Stop the answer with the stop button while it is being written. You keep what was written up to that point.
- Copy a finished answer with a long press on it.
The app needs a connection to answer. Messages from the app count towards the same monthly limits as on the web, and the line under the message box shows what you have left.
Ask support
In My Assistant on the web, Ask support at the top of the chat is for questions about Vinius itself: how a screen works, or why something does not work for you. It answers from this help centre and the FAQ, and can check your own role and plan. It does not read your inventory or your customers. The empty chat offers a few starter cards here too. Back to My Assistant takes you back to your wine questions.
- Sources. Under Sources, each answer links to the help articles it used.
- No match, no guess. When no article covers the question, it says so instead of inventing steps, and offers to send your question to Vinius support.
- Your language. The help centre is written in English and Dutch. Ask in German, French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese and the answer comes in that language, with its sources in English. Any source in a language other than yours carries a language tag, for example Auf Englisch when you use Vinius in German.
Sending a support request. When the help centre cannot solve it, Ask support prepares a Support request and shows it to you first: the Subject, the Message, and under Sent along with it the app version, device, organization, site, role, plan and recent error codes. Vinius fills in your name and email address itself. Send to support sends it and Cancel drops it. Nothing reaches support until you send it, and a request you leave alone expires after 15 minutes. The reply arrives in your Vinius messages.
Ask support has its own limit of 10 questions per person per day, and those questions do not count towards your monthly messages. You can send up to 3 support requests an hour.
How the monthly limits work
My Assistant counts messages, not conversations. A ten-message conversation uses ten. Two limits run side by side, and the one with less room left is the one that stops you.
Your own limit. Every person has a monthly number of messages, and it follows you. If you belong to more than one organization, the messages you send in each of them add up against the same personal limit, so joining five organizations does not give you five allowances. When your organizations are on different plans, the most generous one sets your number.
Your organization's total. Each organization also has a monthly total of three times the personal limit, shared by everyone in it. On a team of five, that means the team can send three people's worth between them, and nobody more than their own limit.
Right now the personal limit is 50 messages a month and the organization total is 150. The line under the message box always shows the numbers that apply to you.
What counts:
- Every message you send, including a starter card you tap and Improve answer, which sends a new request.
- Messages from the app, in the same way as on the web.
- A label photo in the chat uses one message, for the answer it produces.
- A wine list intro text generated for a wine card uses one message too.
What does not count:
- A message refused because a limit is reached.
- The welcome screen. It costs nothing until you send something.
- Questions to Ask support. They have their own daily limit.
Both counts start again at the beginning of each calendar month.
Where to see your usage
Open My Assistant. Under the message box, a short line shows how many messages you have left this month and the date the count resets, for example "38 of your 50 messages left this month". When your organization's total is closer to running out than your own limit, the line shows the organization's number instead, so you always see the limit that will stop you first. When no monthly limit applies to you, the line is not shown.
Owners and admins see both limits of the organization's plan under Account Settings > Billing: AI chats per person and AI chats per organization.
When you reach a limit
The chat tells you which limit you reached, yours or your organization's, and the date it resets. The message you tried to send is not counted. Your conversations stay available, so you can still read, copy and reopen earlier answers.
What you can do:
- Wait for the reset on the 1st of the next month.
- If the organization's total is used up, everyone on the team is in the same position. On a small team it pays to agree who uses the assistant for what: one nightly service briefing with a few follow-up questions adds up quickly.
- Need more for a specific project? Contact Vinius support.
- An Unlimited My Assistant add-on, which removes the personal limit for one person in one organization, is planned and currently marked as coming soon.
Getting better answers
- Complete your data first. The assistant is only as good as the inventory, pricing and storage records behind it. See Managing storage.
- Be specific. A dish, a price band and a style preference produce a usable answer. "Recommend a wine" does not.
- Describe your venue once. Custom instructions in Personalize Assistant go with every question, so you do not have to repeat them.