How to use the AI assistant, voice input and Siri gate approvals

What can I ask the AKCS assistant?

Ask it anything about your own flat and your community, in plain language. The assistant is built into the AKCS app and answers from live community data, not from a help page — your invoices, your complaints, your visitors, this Saturday's clubhouse bookings.

These are the starter questions the app itself suggests:

• Do I have any unpaid invoices?
• Invite a guest for tomorrow evening
• What is the status of my complaints?
• Is the clubhouse free on Saturday morning?
• Who visited my flat this week?
• What's happening in the community?

Behind the answer sits a catalog of 70 tools across 11 domains — 54 that only read, 14 that can change something.

The 5 administrative tools are not in a resident's catalog at all, so the assistant cannot reach them for you, and it cannot see any household but yours. There is a cap of 120 messages per resident per day.

It is also not allowed to answer from memory: the first turn of every question must fetch data before the model may write a sentence, so a number it gives you came from your community's records.

Can I ask in Hindi or Telugu?

Yes. It replies in whatever language you wrote in — English, Hindi, Telugu, or romanised Hinglish typed in the Latin alphabet. There is no setting to switch.

How do I talk to it instead of typing?

There is a mic button next to the message box.

1. Tap the mic and speak.
2. Tap it again to stop, or simply stop talking — a finished sentence sends itself.
3. Long-press the mic to choose the language it listens for: English, हिन्दी or తెలుగు.
4. A language your phone's speech recogniser does not have is greyed out with the reason, rather than failing silently.

Your words go to the assistant exactly as spoken, with no translation step in between. The assistant replies in text only — it does not speak back.

Can I raise a complaint by speaking in my own language?

Yes, and the complaint form handles this differently from the assistant, because a complaint has to be readable by whoever fixes it. You speak in your language, AKCS transcribes it, translates the description into English, and stores your original words and the language you spoke alongside the English on the same complaint. Nothing is thrown away.

The complaint form lets you speak in 8 languages — Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati — filtered to the ones your phone can recognise, with Hindi as the default. See how to raise a complaint for the rest of that flow.

You can also just tell the assistant to raise it. It will ask which category the problem falls under, then show an approval card naming the category and the criticality before anything is filed.

Why does it ask me to approve before it books or invites anything?

Because the model is never allowed to change your community on its own word. Every action is two-phase: the assistant proposes, AKCS shows you a card spelling out the exact request — for a guest invite, the name, the date and the time it would book — and it runs only after you accept.

The card is the safety mechanism, not a hurdle. It is what lets the assistant do real things instead of staying read-only:

• The card is signed, tied to you and that one conversation, and expires after 15 minutes. Ignore it and nothing happens.
• Text written by other people — complaint bodies, visitor names, announcements — reaches the model as data, never as instructions, so nobody can plant a sentence that makes your assistant act.
• Every call is recorded: the tool, the arguments, the result, and whether a human approved it. See who can see my data.

Actions you can ask for and then approve include inviting a guest, creating a gate pass, pre-approving a cab, answering someone waiting at the gate, raising or commenting on a complaint, booking or cancelling an amenity or a service worker, registering a vehicle, voting in a poll, and reporting a parking violation.

What exactly do I say to Siri?

Eight phrases, four each way. Say them as written.

If one person is waiting, Siri acts and tells you who was let in. If two or more are, it reads the names out and asks which you meant. If nobody is, it says so.

There is no negative phrase, on purpose. Never try "don't let them in" — voice matching works by meaning, a dropped "don't" sits closest to "let them in", and that mistake would open the gate.

Why must I say "with AKCS" every time?

Apple requires the app name inside every spoken phrase, so a bare "Hey Siri, approve the gate request" is impossible to ship. You can rename the shortcut on your own phone in the Shortcuts app, but that is manual setup on one device and not something we can turn on for you.

Two more limits. Siri gate approvals need iOS 16 or later and there is no Android equivalent — on Android you answer from the push notification. And Siri only looks at the community currently selected in the app, so if you belong to two, select the right one first.

Unlike the assistant, a Siri approval has no confirmation step: the phrase is the decision, and the request is answered on the spot. Siri names the person afterwards so you can catch a misheard command before the guard acts. If someone else in your flat already answered, you hear that instead.

Answering at the gate is the fallback. Pre-approving is still the calmer path — see how to pre-approve a visitor, or the AKCS AI product page for how the assistant is built.