The chat surface is where most work happens. Open the app, you land on /chat and a fresh conversation is waiting. Type and press Enter to send.
Starting a new conversation
The sidebar's New Chat button (top-left) starts a fresh conversation. Until you send the first message, no conversation row appears in history; it's a draft. The moment you send, the conversation gets saved and an auto-generated title appears in the header.
Picking a model
The composer has a model picker next to the input. The list shows every model your organisation has enabled. There's usually a fast everyday model marked as default plus heavier options for harder work. Models in maintenance are greyed out.
Your last choice is remembered per device. If a model gets pulled or goes into maintenance, the app falls back to the default automatically, so you won't get stuck on a model that can't answer.
Reasoning (thinking) toggle
Some models support extended reasoning: they spend extra tokens working through the problem before replying. Open the toggles menu (gear icon next to the composer) to switch Thinking on or off.
- Thinking on: the assistant streams a collapsed "thinking" trace before the final answer. Expand it to see the model's working. Useful for code, analysis, multi-step problems.
- Thinking off: model replies directly. Faster, cheaper, fine for short questions.
Models that don't support thinking show the toggle as disabled. Your preference is remembered per-model, so a heavyweight model can stay in thinking mode while a fast model stays direct.
If a thinking trace is open, the Expand Thinking option in the same menu auto-expands new traces as they arrive instead of leaving them collapsed.
Web search
If your organisation has web search enabled, the toggles menu has a Web Search option. Turn it on for a question that needs current information (news, prices, anything time-sensitive) and the assistant fetches and cites web results in its reply.
Web search is opt-in per turn: it stays off by default and won't fire unless you've enabled it.
Attaching files
You can attach files three ways:
- Paperclip / Add files button in the composer.
- Drag and drop files onto the chat. The input lights up with a drop zone.
- Paste an image or large text block directly into the composer.
Supported types include PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, plain text, CSV/Excel, JSON, code files, and common image formats. Files are processed depending on type. See Files and sources for what happens to each.
A large text paste (more than a few thousand characters) is auto-converted into a .txt source and attached, rather than dumping the full blob into the message. Small pastes appear as a collapsible chip above the input.
Mentioning sources with @
Type @ in the composer to open the mentions popover. It lists every source in your library (databases, APIs, MCP servers, uploaded files) grouped by type. Pick one to attach it to this conversation.
Navigation inside the popover:
- ↑ ↓ move between sources
- Enter attaches the selected source
- Esc closes without attaching
Once a source is attached, the assistant can query it on every turn. Use the Sources sidebar (right side of the chat) to toggle individual sources on or off without removing them.
Voice input
The composer has a microphone button for dictation. Speak, it transcribes into the input, and you review before sending. A separate voice mode turns the chat into a full hands-free conversation: the assistant speaks the reply back. Press Esc to leave voice mode.
Dictation and voice mode use your browser's microphone permission. If nothing happens when you press the mic, check the site permission.
Ephemeral chats
The sidebar has an Ephemeral mode toggle directly under New Chat. Turn it on and any conversation you start is marked ephemeral:
- All messages, attachments, vector collections, and any shell containers are permanently deleted when your session ends (sign out, token expiry, or session loss).
- Sources you added from your library are unlinked but not deleted from the library.
- A violet ring around your avatar and a banner in the header tell you ephemeral mode is on.
Use this for sensitive material you don't want kept around. It's the closest thing to incognito browsing the chat has.
Stopping a response
While the assistant is generating, the send button becomes a stop button. Click it to halt generation. The partial response is saved to the conversation; you can edit your prompt and try again, or keep going from where it stopped.
Where next
- Files and sources: what happens to documents you attach
- Conversation history: rename, archive, share, export past chats
- Projects: pin a set of sources to every new conversation
- Cloud agents: hand a prompt off to run in the background