The AI assistant & natural-language search

The chat assistant

The assistant lives in a persistent chat dock in the bottom-right of the app, and follows whichever project you're currently in — open a project, open the dock, and it already has that project's context.

What you can do with it:

• Drop in product links — paste one or several URLs and it kicks off the scrapes, figures out which room they belong to (from context, room names, or by asking you), sets quantity if you say so ("12 boxes of this oak flooring for the living room"), and confirms each item with its image and price once it's in.
• Ask budget questions grounded in your live project data — "how are we tracking on the kitchen?", "what happens if we swap the sofa for this one?", "which rooms are over?", "what's my margin on this project?"
• Take actions via tool calls: create/update/move/delete items, adjust quantities, set room budgets, toggle client-visible, manage alternatives and which one's in-budget, apply or override markup on an item, draft client emails, summarise client feedback, draft invoices, and generate or refine mood boards.
• Accept an image — a fabric swatch photo or a product screenshot — and create an item from it.

Sensitive actions need your confirmation

The assistant can never send an email, issue an invoice, or take another meaningfully destructive/financial action on its own. When it wants to do one of those, it shows an in-chat confirmation card — "Needs your approval" — with a plain-language summary of exactly what it's about to do, and Confirm / Deny buttons. Nothing happens until you click Confirm; the card expires after a short window if you never respond, so a stale confirmation can't be actioned much later without you re-asking. The model itself has no way to approve its own action — only a click from you does that.

What it can't see

In a client-context conversation (from the portal), cost, margin, and other designer-only data are never available to the assistant, the same as everywhere else in the product — see How budgets and margin work.

Natural-language search (Cmd+K)

Press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K on Windows/Linux) anywhere in the app to open global search. Type normally to keyword-match across projects, rooms, items, clients, invoices, suppliers, and files — or phrase it like a question ("items over $500 in the kitchen that are still draft") and Mortar interprets it into a structured filter and runs that instead. If natural-language interpretation isn't available in your environment, search quietly falls back to plain keyword matching — you're never blocked from searching.

FAQ

Does the assistant email my client without asking? No — sending anything external always requires you to click Confirm on an in-chat card first.

Can I undo something the assistant did? Everything it changes shows up in the project's activity feed, and most item/room edits can be undone the same way you'd undo a manual change (e.g. moving a status back). Sent emails and issued invoices can't be recalled once confirmed — that's exactly why they require confirmation in the first place.

Why did my search return a plain keyword match instead of understanding my phrasing? Natural-language interpretation depends on the AI provider being configured for your environment; when it's not available, search still works as ordinary keyword matching.