What is Marvin?

Marvin is the AI assistant built into NIZU Cloud WorkSpace. It lets staff, clients and leads ask plain-language questions about their own business data — for example “tell me about invoice #586” or “which clients have gone dormant?” — get a clear conversational answer, and increasingly get work done: creating a project, drafting an invoice, adding a task. It also answers visitors on your public website through an embeddable chat widget.

What Marvin does, in short

• Answers questions about your data. Invoices, projects, tasks, support tickets, clients and expenses — fetched live and scoped to what the person asking is allowed to see.
• Produces lists and reports. Clients, leads, providers, projects, invoices and credit notes, with filters such as dormant or active; income, expense and project reports come back with a chart.
• Creates records from a conversation. Projects, tasks, milestones, clients, leads, team members, and documents (invoice, credit note, order, estimate, proposal) — each gated by the permission the user already has.
• Works in three places. The NIZU Team Messenger, Telegram (private chats and groups), and a public chat widget you embed on your own website.
• Speaks. Answers can be read aloud, either by the browser voice or by a self-hosted neural voice so nothing leaves your server.

How Marvin is different

Most AI assistants hand your data to a language model and let the model decide what to do. Marvin does the opposite. NIZU identifies who is asking, checks that they are allowed to see the requested record, and fetches that record live from the workspace database. Only then is a language model asked to phrase the answer. The model never authorizes access and never fetches data on its own.

Core ideas

• NIZU is the single source of truth. Records are read live, never copied into the model or into a separate index.
• The model is a language layer, not a data layer. It phrases answers; it does not decide who may see what.
• The provider is swappable. A self-hosted engine (Ollama) in production, or OpenAI, DeepSeek, Grok or Claude — changed with one setting, no code change.
• Real data stays where it belongs. By default, real workspace data only ever reaches the self-hosted engine. Sending it to a third-party cloud API is an explicit, off-by-default opt-in intended for workspaces outside GDPR jurisdiction.
• Every workspace is isolated. NIZU gives each company its own database, so one company's data can never surface in another company's answers.

The website chat widget

Marvin also ships a white-label chat widget you drop onto any website with a single <script> tag. Visitors are anonymous and untrusted, so that widget runs a separate, sandboxed pipeline: it answers only from public knowledge you configure — a knowledge-base text, your published help articles, and what it learns from your own site's sitemap.xml and llms.txt. It can never reach client records, invoices or any private data. When it cannot help, it hands the conversation to a human on your team.

Who is it for?

Staff use Marvin in the main app; clients and leads reach it through the portal; website visitors meet it through the widget. Each person sees only their own data and their own conversation history, while administrators can review conversations for quality.

Why it matters

Marvin turns NIZU into something you can simply talk to. Instead of navigating menus and filters, you ask a question — or give an instruction — and it happens, without exposing your data to a system that should not see it.