Ask the AI

The bar at the bottom of every board is the board's main chat. Type what you want, and press Enter to send or ShiftEnter for a new line. New sheets land at the top left of what you are looking at, and your view follows the first one.

While it works, the bar says what it is doing: Thinking, Searching the web for “…”, Reading page 3 of “report.pdf”, or Writing “Launch plan” while a sheet streams in. Everyone on the board watches the sheet being written, not only you. The send button turns into Stop while it runs.

Chat above the input opens the conversation. Under each answer, an On the board card lists the sheets it made; click one to fly to it. The AI's reply in the chat is a sentence or two. The content itself is always on the board.

Double-click an empty spot on the board, or pick Ask at a spot (Q) and click. A chat opens right there as a slip, and what it makes lands beside it. This keeps separate questions apart: a board can hold many of these chats, and several can run at the same time.

Click on an item with the same tool and the chat is about that item. “This”, “it” and “the whole thing” then mean that item, the AI changes it in place, and the chat's dot sticks to it when it moves.

Dots

A closed chat is a dot on the board. Magenta when idle, pulsing cyan while it runs. Click it to open its slip.

One slip at a time

Opening a dot closes the other slip. A running chat carries on with its slip closed.

Hide all chats

The button in the top bar hides every dot, slip and the chat bar, to see the board clean. Starting a new chat shows them again.

Delete this chat

In a slip's header. The sheets it made stay on the board.

Type @ in any chat to list what is on the board by name: sheets by title, documents by file name, notes by their first words, frames and groups. Use ↑ ↓ and Enter; the item lights up on the board as you go through the list. Naming a group sends all of it, naming a frame sends everything inside.

The AI is told the request is about the items you named and changes them in place rather than making new ones. The first three named sheets travel with the message in full.

Select one or more items and the selection toolbar offers two ways to ask about them:

Mention in the chat

Types their names into the chat bar, so your next message is about them.

Chat about this here

Opens a new chat beside the selection, pinned to it, with the names already typed.

Even without either, the AI knows what you have selected when it looks at the board, and treats it as what the request is most likely about. Selected images are attached so it can see them (up to four).

Menu → Thinking sets how much the AI reasons before it answers, for everyone on the board:

Low

Brief reasoning. Fastest and cheapest. The default.

High

Thinks first. Better at hard requests, and a run can cost a few times as much.

Max

Thinks as long as it can. Slow and costly, and a step can run out before it answers.

A sheet that was interrupted while being written is marked Stopped partway and gets two buttons: Continue asks the chat that wrote it to carry on, Keep as is marks it finished. A rewrite of an existing sheet that was interrupted is rolled back instead, so nothing is left half changed.

A single request can take up to 24 steps. If a big job runs out of them, what was done stays on the board and the reply says so; ask again to carry on.

1. 1The board's owner and signed-in editors can ask. Whoever asks, the owner's balance pays.
2. 2Guests, people who joined through a link without an account, work by hand. Asking needs an account, so nobody spends your balance by joining.
3. 3Viewers see the chats but have no chat bar.

The board is named after its first question in the main chat, in two to five words, unless you have renamed it already. Naming is free.

More on money in Plans and usage. To change only one part of a sheet, see Change one part of a sheet.