The Story assistant helps you turn a conversation about what you want to build into a user story and acceptance criteria. It uses the story’s existing content and relevant product context, including its epic, peer stories, product glossary, and design decisions.

You can describe the feature in your own words or let the Story assistant guide you through a set of questions. Nothing is applied to the story until you review and accept the suggested changes.

Start a conversation

Open the story you want to work on.
Click Story assistant to open the conversation panel.
Choose how you want to begin.
- Enter a description of the feature or behaviour and send it.
- Click Guide me through it to answer a structured set of questions.

The Story assistant considers the information already on the story when starting the conversation. Its response may ask clarifying questions, suggest what to explore next, or build on an existing user story or acceptance criteria.

📘
Product glossary
If your workspace has not set up a Product knowledge Glossary, the Story assistant lets you know and provides a link to create one.
The glossary acts as a blueprint of your product, capturing its concepts, features, and how they relate. That gives the Story assistant a much deeper understanding of what you’re building, so it can ask sharper questions, spot important connections, and make suggestions grounded in your product rather than generic assumptions.

Answer structured questions

The Story assistant may present questions as quick-pick cards instead of requiring a written response at every step.

Each set includes a page indicator, such as 1 / 3.
Questions may allow one answer or multiple answers.
Select Other to enter a free-text response.
Use the back and forward controls to review or change your answers.
Click Skip to move past a question without answering it.
After you complete or skip the final question, your answers are submitted together and a read-only summary remains in the conversation.

You can close the question card at any time to continue the conversation using free text.

Generate a user story or acceptance criteria

As the conversation develops, the Story assistant may give you the option to generate a user story or acceptance criteria based on what you've discussed.

Generate user stories

The Story assistant uses personas defined in your workspace when they fit the conversation. When a different persona is needed, it can include one in the suggested user story and create it when you accept the changes.

If the conversation involves more than one persona, you can ask the Story assistant to generate an additional user story.

After generating a user story, use the options under Next steps to generate another one or continue to acceptance criteria.

Generate acceptance criteria

The Story assistant generates a complete suggested set of acceptance criteria based on the conversation and any criteria already on the story.

Its suggestions may add, rewrite, reorder, split, or remove criteria. Review the complete set before accepting or rejecting it.

Review and apply suggested changes

The Story assistant does not write directly to your story. Suggested changes appear in a preview over the story content, with AI-authored content highlighted so you can distinguish it from existing content.

While the preview is open, you can:

Continue the conversation and add more suggested changes.
Edit the staged content directly.
Click Accept changes to apply all staged changes to the story.
Click Reject to discard all staged changes.

After you accept changes, a confirmation appears and a divider is added to the conversation to mark where they were applied.

If you reject the staged changes, an Undo option remains available briefly.

Undo the latest AI change

The most recent AI change includes its own Undo option in the conversation. Use it to reverse that change without discarding everything else in the preview.

After you undo it, select Redo to restore it.

Undo is available only for the most recent AI change. It is no longer available after the Story assistant makes another change or you edit the staged content directly.

Each change is also identified in the conversation, for example, Added user story or Updated acceptance criteria.

🚧
Leaving with pending changes
If you navigate away from the story while the preview contains unsaved changes, Atono asks you to confirm before leaving.
You can close the Story assistant panel without losing the staged changes. The preview remains open on the story.

Use product context

The Story assistant can use information beyond the current conversation when generating suggestions.

Epic and peer stories. If the story belongs to an epic, the Story assistant can use the epic’s goal and the peer stories included in its context.
Product glossary. The Story assistant uses your workspace glossary to reflect your product’s language and relationships.
Design decisions. The Story assistant uses existing design decisions associated with the story as context.

The context available to the Story assistant depends on the story and the information provided to the current conversation.

Capture design decisions

As rationale, tradeoffs, and scope decisions come up in the conversation, the Story assistant can add them to the story’s design decisions when you accept the suggested changes.

You can also ask it to save a specific decision. It confirms what was saved and which story it was added to.

📘
Long conversations
In longer conversations, the Story assistant may summarize earlier messages to preserve context. A marker in the conversation shows where the summary begins.

See what the Story assistant changed

Changes made with the Story assistant remain attributed to the user who initiated them. A sparkle (✦) icon appears next to the user’s name, and its tooltip identifies the change as Performed by Story assistant.

You can also filter the Activities list by Source: Story assistant to view only changes made with the assistant. For more information, see Filter activities.