Sharing a chat with your team

A side chat can be worked on by more than one person. You start a proposal with the Sales agent, bring in a teammate, and they open the same thread, see everything said so far and carry on from there.

Sharing a chat

Select Share at the top of a side chat. Search your team by name and select Add. Each person is Can Reply to start with, and you can set them to Can View or take them out at any time. Copy Link copies the chat’s address; it only opens for people in the chat. Anyone else sees You don’t have access to this chat and who to ask.

Only the chat’s owner changes who is in a chat. An admin can too, but only in a chat they can already open: being an admin gives nobody a way into someone’s chat.

A chat shared with you is listed under Shared With Me in the team rail, with whose it is. On a phone, it is under Your Team.

What people in a chat can see and do

Everyone in a chat sees the whole thread, with each person’s messages under their name. The agent’s replies look as they always do.

• Can Reply sends messages and can edit the chat’s documents. When a message wakes the agent, it runs on that person’s own access, model choice and allowance.
• Can View reads the thread and its documents. The box at the bottom says so.

Only the owner can rate an answer or save it to the brain. A write a tool asks to make waits for the person whose message started it.

Talking to each other, and asking the agent

Once a chat has other people in it, what you send is for them: it lands in the thread and the agent stays quiet. A message that @mentions a teammate is the same, even in a chat that had nobody else in it until then.

The agent reads everything said, and replies when someone asks it to, in either of two ways:

• Put @ and its name in your message, such as @Atlas what do the numbers say?
• Select the Ask button under the newest message, which carries the agent’s name (Ask Atlas, say) and has it answer what has been said so far.

A chat with only you in it works as it always has: the agent answers every message.

One reply at a time

A chat runs one person’s turn at a time. While a reply is running, a line above the box says the agent is replying and to whom. A message for the team goes straight into the thread. One with @ and the agent’s name joins that reply at its next step, under your name. You follow along as each message lands; the words of the reply appear when it is finished. The person who sent the turn or the chat’s owner can stop it.

If a reply ends before it reads your message, your message stays in the thread and the Ask button has the agent answer it.

Mentioning a teammate

Type @ in the box to pick a teammate by name. Their name goes into your message and shows as a chip above it. When you send, they join the chat with Can Reply if they aren’t in it yet (a note says so before you send), and they get a notification. The agent reads the mention as plain text: the person’s name.

The @ list starts with the chat’s agent, then your teammates.

Notifications

The bell in the top bar shows how many notifications you haven’t read. Select it to see who mentioned you, shared a chat with you, changed what you can do in one or took you out of one. Select one to open the chat, or Mark All Read to clear them. Opening a chat any other way marks its notifications read too. Notifications stay in the app: nothing is emailed or sent to Slack.

What can’t be shared

Sharing never shows someone what they couldn’t otherwise see:

• Departments. A person can only join a chat if they can see every department it touches: its agent, the skill it runs and any skill used along the way. See Department access. If an admin later takes that department away, the chat goes away with it and comes back if the access does. Someone who can’t join says why in the Share dialog and the @ list.
• Sources a person can’t read. A chat that read something closed to a person, through a source it cites or an app it used, is closed to them too, at once, and comes back if that opens up. They can’t be added to it until then. Each person’s turn searches only what they may read.
• Private connections. A chat that has read your private connections, such as your email, can’t be shared. Once a chat is shared, personal connections and private documents stay off in it for everyone, because everyone in it would see the result.
• Main threads. A main thread holds everything you’ve said to an agent, so it stays yours. Start a side chat to work on something together. The same goes for a dashboard tab’s active chat.