Ask the AI

What You Can Ask

Type	Examples
Best card for...	"Best card for Amazon?", "What should I use for gas?"
Compare cards	"Compare Sapphire vs Gold for travel"
Strategy advice	"Should I keep my Platinum card?", "How do I maximize points?"
Card research	"What cards would complement my setup?"

Example Prompts

Everyday Spending

• "What card should I use for groceries at Costco?"
• "Best card for my $50 Netflix subscription?"
• "Which card for a $200 restaurant dinner?"

Travel

• "What's my best card for booking flights?"
• "Should I use my Sapphire or Venture for hotels?"
• "Best card for international purchases?"

Strategy

• "Is the Amex Gold worth $250/year for me?"
• "What card am I missing in my wallet?"

Quick Starters

A row of suggestion chips appears above the input when you start a new chat. Each chip is a one-tap shortcut into a common kind of question.

Suggestion Chips

Tap a chip to prefill the input with its prompt. Review it, edit if you want, then tap send. Cardzen never auto-sends a chip prompt, so you stay in control of what the AI sees. The set reshuffles each time you start a new chat. Examples include "At checkout", "Plan a purchase", "Best for groceries", "Eating out", "Worth the fee?", and "Tour my wallet". Some chips end with a trailing space so you can finish the thought with a merchant or detail before sending.

Near Me (iOS)

iOS app only. Near Me is available in the Cardzen iOS app and uses Apple Maps. It is not shown on the web, desktop PWA, or Android. Download the app from the App Store.

Tap Near Me on a blank chat to ask the AI what card to swipe based on where you are right now. The first tap asks for location permission; once granted, Cardzen reads your position and pulls a list of nearby places from Apple Maps. Unlike the other chips, Near Me sends automatically once it finds places, so you do not have to type anything.

It scans within about 200 meters of you (expanding to 500 meters if it needs more variety), filters out spots you cannot swipe a card at (parks, transit stops, hospitals, schools, libraries), and sends likely spending places to the AI. In normal areas, the AI replies with Best card for the closest place or tight cluster, plus the reason: multiplier, relevant credit, or perk. If several nearby places are the same kind of spend, it can combine them under one default card instead of repeating the same advice. In dense areas with many nearby businesses, it replies with Best nearby cards and groups the nearby places by spend category, choosing one default card per category so the answer stays short and swipe-ready. Farther matches can still appear under an Also nearby bullet when the AI is answering for a smaller exact-place cluster.

Each recognized nearby place keeps any eligible exact wallet bonus. For a primary U.S. place with no supported bonus, Cardzen may instead recommend the best eligible selected, unfrozen card at its verified standard rate. It labels that rate as standard rather than inventing a retail, optical, or other category bonus. This backup is deliberately conservative: Cardzen may omit it when the place type, country information, merchant restriction, or card's general rate is not clear enough. An unlabeled place or an Also nearby match is not used to conclude that no bonus applies.

When Near Me will not run:

• Location permission denied. Re-enable location for Cardzen in iOS Settings.
• Offline. Near Me needs a network connection to query Apple Maps.
• Nothing usable nearby. If the area has no merchants in range, the chat tells you so.

Tips for Better Answers

1. Be specific about the merchant

   • Good: "Best card for Costco gas"
   • Okay: "Best card for gas"

2. Describe the purchase

   "Which of my cards fits a laptop purchase?"

3. Include constraints

   • "...but I don't want to pay an annual fee"
   • "...preferring cashback over points"

4. Set your preferences

   The AI remembers your custom instructions from Preferences.

Understanding Recommendations

The AI considers:

• Multipliers - Compares the supported earn rates and explains the deciding rule
• Standard rates - For a simple purchase with no eligible exact bonus, can fall back to the best verified general earning rate without describing it as a category bonus
• Credits - Can you use a credit instead of paying?
• Bonuses - Are you working toward a spending threshold?
• Your preferences - What you've told it matters to you

Live Web Search (Pro)

Eligible Pro chats can search the public web when current information would improve a card, rewards, travel benefit, issuer, or merchant recommendation. The AI normally uses no search or one focused search, and may use up to three distinct searches when a question has separate evidence gaps.

You can ask for a lookup as a follow-up. For example, after asking which card to use at a merchant, say "look it up online." Cardzen uses the immediately preceding question as the subject of that search.

Search is limited to public, non-personal topics connected to how you use Cardzen. It does not search for private account details, personal records, people, or unrelated topics. Search results are treated as evidence, not instructions, and answers include links only to sources returned by the search provider.

You can keep a response entirely within your saved Cardzen data by saying, for example, "do not search the web" or "answer without browsing." An explicit request not to search takes priority for that message.

Successful searches are subject to operational limits that are currently configured at up to 50 per day and 500 per month. These limits are not guaranteed service levels and may change. If search is disabled, unavailable, outside scope, or at a limit, chat still answers from the information it already has and tells you that live verification was unavailable.

What the AI Can Do For You (Pro)

Pro feature. AI actions are included with Cardzen Pro. Free users can still ask the AI any question and get full recommendations and explanations, but chat requests to change cards or credits (marking credits used, adding cards, freezing cards, setting preferences) return a Pro feature message instead of running. Free users can still manage cards manually from My Cards.

For Pro users, the AI takes actions on your behalf:

Action	How to Ask
Add cards to your wallet	"Add the Chase Sapphire Preferred to my cards"
Update credit status	"Mark my Amex dining credit as used"
Set card preferences	"Set my Gold card as preferred for dining"
Freeze/unfreeze cards	"Freeze my Capital One card"

Just ask naturally, and the AI will handle the action for you.

Voice Input and Voice Responses

Voice is available in the Cardzen iOS app, on the App Store:

• The send button becomes a mic icon when the input is empty. Tap, speak, and the app sends on a pause (about 1.5 seconds), on stop, or at the 30-second cap.
• The AI reads back a short spoken summary of voice messages. Typed messages stay text-only.
• Audio plays through the speaker or headphones even with silent mode on. Disable anytime via Voice Summaries in Preferences.

Pro gets Natural Voice, richer AI-generated audio with four voices: Aria, Nova, Atlas, and Sage. Free users hear your device's built-in text-to-speech. Configure it all in Preferences > Voice.

Daily Zen

Each day, you can open your Daily Zen from the Daily Zen button in the top corner of a new chat. On a fresh day, a short teaser also appears on the new chat screen until you view it. It is a short, AI-generated summary that picks up to three sections from a larger catalog based on what's happening in your wallet that day. A few examples:

• Credits expiring soon
• Quick wins you can act on today
• Your monthly progress

There are more sections that rotate in (new credits at the start of the month, ROI snapshots, category spotlights, year-over-year comparisons, and others). See the Daily Zen help section for the full list and how to personalize it.