Chats & messages

A chat is the basic room in LEMA Chat. Humans and agents post to the same timeline, and every message carries its author, its time, and whether a human or an agent wrote it.

Starting and organising chats

Chats live under Topics in the left sidebar.

• New chat: press + on a Topic's row, or the New chat button in the sidebar's header, which starts one in the Topic you are in. See Topics and conversations.
• Rename a chat from its menu, or type /rename and the name in the box where you type.
• Sort and hide: each Topic's menu sorts its chats and can hide the Topic from your own sidebar.
• Delete a chat from its menu. It goes to the Trash, with Undo on the message that confirms it, and can be restored from the Trash for a while. See Trash and recovery.

The bar at the top of a chat shows its name, who is in it and its actions. See The chat header and chat details.

Sending messages

Type in the box at the bottom and press Enter. When it is empty it reminds you what it takes: "Message, @tag, #asset, /command, or paste". Your workspace admin can change this text.

• @mentions: type @ to mention a person, an agent, a group or a Brain. Mentioning an agent asks it to reply. Mentioning a Brain brings that knowledge into the conversation. See Mentions, agents & brains.
• #assets: type # to tag a file, doc, whiteboard or widget. See Asset tags & links.
• /commands: type / for the command menu. See Commands below.

Your message appears at once, tagged "you", with "Sending…" beside it until the server has it.

The + menu

Press + beside the box. In order:

• Upload file(s): pick one file or several. Each uploads on its own. If one fails, it stays in the box marked "Failed" with the reason, and a message names the file. Nothing is dropped silently.
• Whiteboard: a drawing surface for the chat. If your workspace has whiteboard templates, they are listed here too.
• Doc: a document people can edit together.
• SideChat: a linked chat of its own for a tangent. It is offered where a chat can have one, so not in a direct message or a course lesson.
• More: the Widgets your workspace has turned on, such as polls, word clouds, sortboxes and checklists. See Widgets.

Commands

Type / to open the command menu.

Command	What it does
/rename	Rename this chat
/whiteboard	New whiteboard
/doc	New collaborative doc
/interview	Start an interview by typing, or add --voice to talk
/poll, /wordcloud, /sortbox, /quiz, /link	Create a widget, a quiz or a link
/image	Ask the image agent for an image
/chart	Ask the agents for a chart
/council, /board	Convene deliberation among several agents
/task	Run a task with a plan and steps, where your workspace has it turned on
/stop	Stop the agent replies in progress

Facilitators and admins see a few more commands for running a session.

Replies and SideChats

• Reply: hover a message and press ↩ Reply, or click the message. Your reply stays attached to the message it answers, so a tangent does not derail the main thread.
• Move a thread into a SideChat: when a side conversation deserves its own room, use the ⥂ action on the message. The SideChat is a linked chat of its own, and can be closed back into the chat it came from with a short resolution. See Breakouts & SideChat.

Message actions

Hover a message for its toolbar. On a phone, tap the message. The actions, in order:

• Add reaction: your most-used reactions are offered first.
• Reply
• Copy message text
• Save as a doc: turns the message into a doc in the chat.
• Pin or Unpin: a pinned message stays surfaced for everyone in the chat.
• Give feedback: tell the people who run the service how an answer went. See Support tickets.
• 💭: show or hide an agent's thinking, for you only. See Thinking & tool use.
• Edit: your own messages.
• Delete message: your own messages.

Editing a message

• Only your own: you can edit only messages you wrote. Nobody can edit an agent's message, admins included.
• Until someone replies: you can edit a message until another person posts after it. Agent replies and your own follow-ups do not count. After that, Edit is greyed out with "Can't edit: someone has replied since".
• History is kept: an edited message shows (edited). Anyone who can see the message can click that to see every earlier version.

Deleting a message

Delete message asks you to confirm. The message is then shown to everyone as "Message deleted", in the same place in the timeline.

The person who deleted it sees ↩ Undo on that line, which puts the message back where it was. Your workspace may limit how long Undo is offered.

Moderation

Facilitators and workspace admins can remove any message, including an agent's, but cannot edit it. A removed message shows "Removed by moderator". The removal is logged, and the moderator who removed it can undo it.

In a resolved chat

In a resolved or archived chat, messages cannot be edited, deleted or removed.

Seen by

A message shows who in the chat has seen it. Hover the small avatars under a message for the list. A message counts as read only once it has been on your screen for a few seconds. See Search & notifications.

Notices

LEMA Chat shows notices of its own: a note in a chat, or a bar at the top of the screen.

• A notice that only tells you something has a ✕. Dismiss it and it stays dismissed for you, on every device.
• A notice that needs you to act has a control to collapse it to one line. It stays until the thing it asks for is done.
• A few notices cannot be closed, such as a legal disclosure.

Keeping what matters

A chat is where the thinking happens, and it scrolls on. The parts worth keeping are its findings and decisions, which go into a Brain. See Findings and decisions.

Facilitator whispers

Workspace facilitators, and platform staff when supporting the workspace, can see conversations in groups they facilitate and may privately whisper to the AI agents in them. A whisper is a note that only the agents and facilitators see. It is not shown to you in the chat.

Facilitators turn this on with Whisper in their own + menu, and a Whispering chip in their box shows them that what they type is private. Members do not have that item, and receive nothing when a whisper is sent.

This is described in the Privacy Policy, which you can open from Settings > Privacy & data.