Service description
What mzassist is, how it works, and what it does not do.
mzassist is an AI support assistant for mzmine. It answers questions about mzmine from the public mzmine documentation and the public mzmine source code, and cites every answer back to the page or the source line it came from.
This document describes the service. The rules for using it are in the terms of use, and how it handles personal data is in the privacy notice.
1. Access and plans
mzassist is provided at no charge to holders of an mzmine COMMUNITY or mzmine PRO licence. It is not sold, and it is not part of the mzmine licence agreement: it is governed by its own terms of use, which each user accepts in the application before first use. Holding one of those licences is the condition of access, and access ends when the licence does. Declining the terms, or having access withdrawn, has no effect on the mzmine licence.
| mzmine plan | mzassist | Use |
|---|---|---|
| COMMUNITY | Included at no charge, full functionality, standard daily allowance | Non-commercial only, as for mzmine itself |
| PRO | Included at no charge, full functionality, increased daily allowance | Commercial use permitted |
| CORE and PLUS | Not included; available by moving to PRO | — |
Daily allowance
Each account has a daily limit on the number of questions it may ask. The limit that applies is shown in the application, and the value shown there is the value that applies. PRO receives a higher allowance than COMMUNITY. mzio may adjust allowances as the service and its operating costs develop.
How access is granted
Access requires signing in with an mzmine account; there is no anonymous use. Whether an account reaches mzassist, and which allowance applies to it, follows from the account's mzmine plan. Access can be withdrawn for an individual account or for a whole organisation without affecting the mzmine licence.
How the terms of use bind the user
Every user accepts the terms of use in the application before first use, and the acceptance is recorded with the version and the time. There is no separate route for commercial users: because mzassist sits outside the licence agreement, no organisation agrees to it on anyone's behalf.
Acceptance binds only the person accepting, for their own use of mzassist. It commits no employer and alters nothing in any mzmine licence agreement.
Independently of acceptance, every user is shown before first use that answers are generated by an artificial intelligence and that confidential or personal data should not be entered.
2. What the service does
mzassist is a browser-based assistant. No installation, plug-in or local component is required.
It answers natural-language questions about mzmine — how a module works, which parameter does what, why a processing step behaves as it does, and where the corresponding behaviour is implemented. Its knowledge is limited to two public sources: the mzmine documentation and the mzmine source code. It has no access to customer data, measurement data, project files or results, and cannot answer questions about them.
- Cited answers. Each numbered reference links to a page on the mzmine documentation site or to a line range in the mzmine source repository.
- Documentation and source coverage. Both the user documentation and the implementation are indexed, so a question can be answered at the level it was asked.
- Audience modes. User biases answers toward the documentation and the graphical interface, Developer toward the source code and line-level references, and Auto infers from the question.
- Visible research trace. Each search and source read is shown while the answer is being prepared.
- Streamed answers, appearing as they are generated.
- Conversation context. Follow-up questions resolve against the current conversation.
- Answer feedback. Individual answers can be rated, which feeds quality monitoring of the service.
3. How the assistant works
The service combines document retrieval with a large language model. It does not answer from the model's own training data alone; it retrieves material first and composes an answer from what it retrieved.
3.1 Corpus preparation
The public mzmine documentation and the public mzmine source code are processed into a searchable corpus. Documentation is divided into sections that retain their canonical page addresses; source code is indexed both as symbol-level records and as file windows, each retaining its file path and line range. The corpus records the repository and commit it was built from, and is rebuilt when mzmine releases change the underlying material.
3.2 Indexing
Each corpus record is converted into a numerical representation (an embedding) and stored alongside a keyword index. Both indexes are held on mzio's own server. Embedding and keyword indexing are performed locally and do not involve any third-party service.
3.3 Answering a question
- The question is matched against the corpus using a combination of semantic similarity and keyword search, and the strongest candidates are re-ranked for relevance.
- The assistant may then perform further targeted searches, keyword lookups or source reads if the initial evidence is insufficient. These steps are shown in the research trace.
- The collected evidence and the question are sent to the AI service, which composes a single answer. Citations are resolved to documentation pages and source line ranges before the answer is displayed.
Only the question, the retrieved public material and the preceding conversation are transmitted to the AI service. The corpus contains no customer data.
3.4 Usage accounting
Each answered question is recorded against the account that asked it, with timestamp, plan, processing volume, cost and response time. These records enforce the daily allowance, control operating cost, and support the detection of misuse.
4. Who receives your data
The privacy notice is the authoritative statement; this list is repeated here for contractual reference and is held against the same configuration.
| Processor | Function | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Mistral AI SAS 15 rue des Halles, 75001 Paris, France |
Generates the answer from the question and the retrieved documentation | France, EU |
| Langfuse GmbH Oranienburger Straße 91, 10178 Berlin, Germany |
Quality and error monitoring of individual answers | Ireland, EU |
| Hetzner Online GmbH Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany |
Hosting of the application and the indexes | Germany, EU |
| Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy, L-1855 Luxembourg |
Infrastructure for the mzio sign-in service | Ireland, EU |
Processing takes place on servers in the European Union. The AI service is not permitted to use submitted content to train AI models.
5. How long we keep it
| Record | Retention |
|---|---|
| Question text and conversation history | 30 days, then automatically deleted |
| Usage and cost records (without question text) | 12 months |
| Server logs and sign-in records | 14 days, then automatically deleted |
| Acceptance of the terms of use | For the duration of access |
| Records relating to suspected misuse | Until the matter is resolved |
Deletion is scheduled and automatic rather than on request only, and the configured periods are verified against this page and the privacy notice on every deployment.
6. Service and support
Questions, fault reports and feedback about mzassist go to info@mzio.io. There is no separate support plan for mzassist and no committed response time; it is handled alongside general enquiries.
mzassist is not itself a support channel for mzmine. An answer it gives is not a statement by mzio support, and a question put to mzassist is not a support request. Support for mzmine continues to follow the channel of the customer's mzmine plan.
The service is provided on a best-effort basis. No availability level, response time or uptime target is guaranteed. Maintenance that may interrupt the service is generally performed outside normal business hours.
mzio may adjust, extend or restrict the functionality of mzassist, including the underlying AI service and the daily allowances, as the service develops. Where the AI service is changed, the privacy notice is updated before the change takes effect.
7. Technical requirements
- Client
- A current version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, with JavaScript enabled
- Account
- A valid mzmine account on a COMMUNITY or PRO licence
- Network
- HTTPS access to
mzassist.mzio.ioand to the mzio sign-in service - Cookies
- Strictly necessary cookies must be permitted for sign-in and conversation continuity
- Installation
- None. No local component, plug-in or mzmine version dependency
The application loads no external fonts, scripts, images or analytics of any kind, and requires no outbound connection from the client other than to the addresses above.
8. Limitations and exclusions
Not for regulated use. mzassist is not a validated system. It must not be used as the basis of a regulatory, clinical, diagnostic or other GxP-relevant decision, and no output from it constitutes a controlled record.
- Answers are generated automatically and may be incomplete, out of date or incorrect, including where they cite a source. Cited material should be checked before an answer is relied upon.
- The assistant covers the public mzmine documentation and source code only. It has no knowledge of customer data, of customer-specific configurations, or of software other than mzmine.
- Availability depends in part on a third-party AI service, over whose technical availability mzio has no control.
- Content submitted to the assistant should not contain personal data, confidential information or material subject to a duty of secrecy. The assistant does not require such content to answer a question.
- Answers may contain or reproduce material protected by third-party rights, which may limit what the recipient may do with them.