Your First Chat
Ask a question, attach a file, and follow the citations.
The home screen is a blank chat. This page walks you through using it for the first time.
1. Ask anything
Type a question into the input at the bottom of the screen and press Enter. Some examples to try:
- "Summarize the latest meeting with the design team."
- "What did we agree about the Q4 launch?"
- "Draft an email to a vendor introducing our team."
- "Make a 5-row spreadsheet of our upcoming product launches."
The assistant works across your meetings, files, calendar, and (if enabled) the web. It will pick the right tools for your question automatically.
2. Attach a file
Click the paperclip in the input to attach a file. PDFs, Office documents, spreadsheets, plain text, and images are all supported. Drag-and-drop also works.
Once attached, you can ask things like "Summarize this PDF" or "Extract the table from this image into a spreadsheet." See Working with files in chat for the full list of supported types and limits.
3. Follow citations
When the assistant answers using your content, it adds small numbered citations like [1] [2] to its response.
- Hover a citation to preview the source — its title, a snippet, and an icon.
- Click a citation to open the original document, web page, email, or meeting.
- A Sources panel on the right collects every source used in the conversation so you can browse them all.
If an answer cites the web, you'll see a favicon and a link. If it cites a Vault file or a meeting, the citation jumps you to the file preview or meeting page.
4. Continue the conversation
Replies keep the context of everything above. You can:
- Ask follow-up questions naturally — "Now make it more formal", "Add a section on pricing".
- Edit your last message to retry with different wording.
- Branch the conversation from any assistant reply to explore an alternative without losing the original. See Chat history.
5. Pin or archive when you're done
When you have a chat you want to keep close by, hover its title in the sidebar and pick Pin. To get it out of your way without deleting it, choose Archive. Anything you archive can be restored later from your data controls.
What's next
- AI Assistant overview — A deeper tour of what the assistant can do.
- The tools the assistant can use — Web search, charts, image and video generation, calendar lookups, and more.
- Generating documents and spreadsheets — How the document canvas works.