Help center › Use every day
Ask Beacon: questions in plain English
The sparkle button in the top bar opens Ask Beacon. Technicians, admins and owners can use it; requesters do not see it.
What it can answer
Counts and averages over your tickets and devices, filtered and grouped the way the Tickets and Assets pages filter them:
- “How many open tickets are there per site?”
- “Which category had the most tickets this month?”
- “Show urgent tickets older than 2 days”
- “Average resolution time by agent last 30 days”
- “How many Chromebooks are in repair at Lincoln High School?”
Filters it understands: status, priority, category, site, team, assignee, requester, created dates, words in the title or description, device type and device status. Grouping: by status, priority, category, site, assignee or day. Measures: a count, or the average time to resolution.
What it does not do
- It never changes anything. It cannot close, assign or edit a ticket.
- It does not read comments or write prose about them; it counts and averages records.
- It only sees your own organization.
How it works
Your question is turned into a small, fixed set of filters and a grouping, never into raw database queries. Beacon runs that against your records, then writes one short paragraph from the rows. Under the answer, Query used shows exactly what was asked, and the table shows the rows. A question counts as one natural-language report, one AI action from your plan's allowance; see Billing and plans.
When AI is not available
Ask Beacon depends on a model provider, and there have been hours when it was unavailable. When that happens the box does not show an error and stop. It tells you plainly why there is no report (the AI is not available, it did not answer in time, it returned an error, or it could not turn the question into one), runs an ordinary search of your tickets, devices, people and articles for the words in your question, and shows those results with links. The message carries a request ID; if something looks wrong, email hello@beaconhelpdesk.com with it and a person will look at exactly what happened. The Beacon team is alerted on its own when the provider is unavailable.
No ticket is ever blocked on AI: everything the question would have counted is still on the Tickets, Assets and Reports pages.