Chat basics

This page is the mental model for everything in the Chat tab. It names the parts of the composer, traces a message from key-press to streamed reply, and explains how a chat is stored once it lands — read it once and the rest of the chat pages are variations on the same flow.

The composer

The composer is the input strip at the bottom of the screen. Three controls matter: the agent picker on the left, the model picker beside it, and the message field with send on the right. Attachments come in via paste, drag-and-drop, or the attach control — see Attachments for what is accepted.

Picking an agent

The agents picker filters by name as you type; the default is an agentless Assistant that uses the org's default chat model and no extra knowledge or tools. Picking an agent before the first message makes the agent sticky for the whole chat; picking one mid-chat applies from the next message onward.

Picking a model

The model picker lists what the agent (or the org, when no agent is picked) allows. Each model carries a tag — Chat, Vision, Image generation, Embedding — that signals what it is good for. Auto picks the agent's primary; when the primary is rate-limited or unavailable, Tale falls back through the agent's failover order.

Reading the reply

The reply streams in token by token. When the agent reasons before answering, a collapsible thinking line appears above the reply. Tool calls render as collapsed boxes you can expand to read what the agent did; Run code output lands in the Canvas on the right, as Code output in its file tree. When the agent retrieves knowledge, citations attach to the sentences they support — hovering over a citation shows the source title, clicking opens the source. The agent's instructions never appear in the rendered reply; they sit one layer down, shaping behaviour rather than text.

Questions from the agent

An agent with the human-input tool can pause mid-task and ask you something — a Question card appears in the chat with the fields the agent needs, and generation waits until you answer. Fill the form and click Submit response, or click Reply differently to push back in free text instead. If your answer was wrong or incomplete, click Edit response on the answered card — the form reopens prefilled, and Update response re-runs the agent with the corrected answer superseding the old one. The card keeps every previous answer: flip through the versions with the arrows next to the response, the way edited messages work.

Conversations versus chats

Within Chat, the unit is a chat — that is the word every button and toast uses. The data model behind it is called threads, and the URL slug is threads/$threadId; the docs follow the UI and say "chat" in body prose. The customer-channel inbox an installed email automation adds is a different surface — a conversation there is a customer thread, not a chat; see Built-in automations for the inbox sense.

History and search

Show chats above the composer opens the history sidebar — every chat you can resume in this org, newest first; selecting one opens the full transcript. Searching there filters by title; full-text search across message bodies is a per-chat operation, not org-wide. Renaming a chat sets a custom title that overrides the model-generated one; deleting a chat moves it into Trash, where retention sweeps it after the grace window.

Where this fits

Chat basics is the page everything else in this section refines: Agents in chat goes deeper on the picker, Attachments on what the upload does, Voice mode on the STT and TTS handoffs around the same composer. If you came here to build an agent rather than use one, jump to Agent concepts — the four-knob mental model is the foundation every chat with an agent depends on.