Using the Chat Interface
This page covers everything around a conversation: the sidebar you navigate the app with, your chat history, attaching files, and the panel that shows what is informing the chat you have open.
The sidebar
A persistent left-hand rail sits on every chat screen. Its header shows your current workspace name and a collapse control; clicking the workspace name opens a switcher to move into another workspace or create a new one. While your account and workspace data are still loading, the header shows placeholder loaders rather than blank space.
| Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| New Chat | Starts a fresh conversation. If your workspace requires every chat to belong to a project, this button opens project creation instead of a blank chat. |
| View All Chats | Opens your full chat history. |
| Projects | Lists your active projects, up to five inline; open one to see the chats filed inside it. A + control creates a new project, and once you have more than five, a link opens the full projects list. |
| Recent Chats | Conversations that aren't filed into any project, most recent first. Drag a chat onto a project row to file it there — you're asked to confirm before the move happens. |
| Collapsed rail | Narrows the sidebar to icons only, keeping New chat, All chats, New project and All projects. Your active workspace's avatar takes the header's place. |
| Footer | Go to eFirm opens eFirm in a new tab without closing your conversation — shown only when your workspace has an active eFirm subscription. Below it sits your account menu: edit profile, settings, language, and log out. |
Chat history
Your past conversations live at /chats, grouped under relative headers — Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Older — with the most recent conversation first inside each group. A conversation moves between groups as it ages. Each row shows its title (or “untitled” if you never gave it one), a one-line preview of the last message prefixed with “You” if you sent it, a relative time, and, on larger screens, a message count and a document count — each shown only when it's above zero.
Search filters your history against your full conversation set, not only what has already loaded on screen. Scrolling near the bottom of the list loads older conversations automatically, with a loading indicator while the next page is fetched.
Renaming and deleting a chat
Each row has an actions menu with Rename and Delete. Rename switches the row into an inline editor pre-filled with the current title; confirm to save, or cancel to back out. A blank title is rejected, and confirming with no change simply closes the editor with nothing updated. Delete asks you to confirm before anything is removed and cannot be undone — renaming carries no such confirmation step. Both actions report success or failure with a toast.
If you have no conversations yet, the list shows a prompt to start one. If a search matches nothing, it shows a different message with no such prompt — the two empty states are deliberately not the same.
Attaching files
Open Attach Files from the composer's compose menu, from the context panel's Attach file button, from a project's files section, or while creating a project. A left rail lists your storage categories; your personal files folder, if you have one, is pinned above them and selected by default. The center pane browses folders with breadcrumbs, a grid/list toggle, and a search box that filters by name within the open folder. Upload and New Folder stay disabled until a category or folder is open.
You can upload by button or by dragging files onto the picker; either way, a supported file is auto-selected up to whatever room is left in your selection. Selected files collect in a bar at the bottom with per-file removal and a clear-all; Attach stays disabled until you've picked at least one.
The assistant can read PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV, HTML, Markdown, plain text, and images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF) — the same list everywhere a file is attached, including a data room. A file outside that list is rejected with a message naming it; the rest of the batch still uploads.
Attaching a file never drops it into the message itself — it always lands in a data room. In a chat, that's your Chat Files, created automatically the first time you add something; on a project page it's the project's own data room, kept separate from any individual chat's files. How many files you can hold depends on your plan — some plans cap it, some don't — and a file moves through pending, processing and ready, or lands in failed; only ready files are usable by the assistant.
The context panel and data room
A folder icon in the chat header opens the panel showing what's feeding the current conversation. It's hidden on a brand-new, empty chat and appears once the chat has files or is under way; while it's closed and files exist, the icon carries a badge with your file count.
The panel shows one of two views, chosen automatically. In a project chat, it's Context: the project's name and icon, a summary of total, ready, processing and failed files, up to five of the project's most recent files, and links to the project dashboard and its file manager — plus a separate Chat files section below for anything you attached to this specific chat, since composer uploads always go to the chat's own store, never straight to the project. In a standalone chat, it's the lighter Chat context view: just your chat's files, an Attach file action that stays visible even when the list is empty, and prompts to fold the chat into a project — either by picking an existing one (archived projects don't appear in that picker) or by naming a new one inline.
Every file row shows its status, opens the original file in a new tab when clicked, and can be removed with no confirmation step.
For how AI document review works against everything sitting in a data room, see AI Document Review.