You already log every expense. The app should be able to answer the question you'd ask a spreadsheet — without the spreadsheet, and without sending your ledger anywhere.
What it does
Ask lives on the On-Device AI tab, next to Capture, and like Capture it is off until you turn it on — one opt-in switch, marked Beta, covering both. Type a question — or tap one of the suggestions — and Pocket Clear answers from your own transactions, on your phone. Five kinds of question come back exact, with the number taken straight from your ledger:
- Totals. "How much on food this month?"
- Comparisons. "Am I spending more than last month?"
- Top lists. "Biggest merchant this year?"
- Lookups. "When did I last pay Uber?"
- Budgets. "Am I over budget?"
"This month" follows your budget start day, the same way Home does — not the calendar month, unless you name a calendar month directly ("food in August"). If a word in your question isn't one of your categories or payees, Ask treats it as a search term and looks for it in your transaction notes instead. Budget questions are the exception: an unknown name gets a "couldn't find" note and the full budget list.
How it stays exact
The model never adds numbers. That distinction is the whole design: rules, or the on-device model when the wording needs it, turn your question into a query — not an answer. The app runs that query against the database sitting on your phone, and a template phrases whatever comes back. There's no step where a language model is asked to do arithmetic, because language models are fluent, not calculators.
Open-ended questions — "Where can I cut back?" — don't fit that path, so they take a different one. The on-device model gets a summary of your last six months and writes a short answer from it. That model is Apple's Foundation Models on an iPhone 15 Pro or later with Apple Intelligence on, or Gemini Nano on an Android phone that has it — where neither is available, Ask answers the exact questions above and says so for the rest. Before that answer reaches you, every number in it is checked against the summary it was built from. If a number doesn't match anything in your data, Pocket Clear doesn't show you a guess — it says "I can't answer that from your data." The answer itself is marked as AI-generated, so it's never confused with the exact answers above it.
What it doesn't do
Some of what Ask leaves out is as important as what it does:
- No forecasts. Ask answers from what's already logged. It doesn't project next month's spending or predict anything.
- No edits. Ask only reads. It never creates, changes, or deletes a transaction.
- No chat history. Each question is answered on its own — there's no running conversation for it to remember or misremember.
- No cloud. Nothing you ask, and nothing Pocket Clear answers, is sent to a server or to any AI provider — the asking and the answering happen on your phone. (Cloud Sync, if you have it on, goes on syncing your transactions themselves, exactly as before.) On Android there's also no voice entry into Ask yet — typing and the suggestion chips are how you reach it there.
Where to find it
Open the On-Device AI tab and use the Ask box at the top, or tap a suggestion chip to try it without typing. On iPhone, you can also say "Ask Pocket Clear about my spending" to Siri and speak the question. If you've linked a partner, answers cover your own transactions by default — switch to Ours above the box to ask about the combined ledger instead.
The full walkthrough, including every exact question type and what Ask needs from your phone, is in the help centre: Ask about your spending.
Try Ask
Update to 2.11 on the App Store or Google Play, then turn On-Device AI on from its tab. Ask, like Capture, is an opt-in Beta — part of Pro, and free for everyone until 31 December 2026.