Send your first message

You’re signed in and looking at a blank conversation. This tutorial walks you through your very first chat — about 60 seconds, start to finish. By the end you’ll have asked a question, watched Chat work through it, read the answer, and checked where the answer came from.

Before you start

You need to be signed in. If you’re not, see Sign in first.

1. Find the input bar

The input bar (we call it the composer) sits at the bottom of every conversation. It’s a single rounded card with a text box on top and a row of controls along the bottom.

When you’re starting fresh, you’ll also see it front and center on the Welcome screen. Either one works — they’re the same composer.

2. Type your question

Click into the text box and type a real question. For your first message, try something self-contained that doesn’t depend on any of your own files yet, for example:

What’s the difference between a fixed-rate and a variable-rate loan?

A few things worth knowing as you type:

• The box grows as you write, so longer questions stay readable.
• There’s a 4,096-character limit per message. A small counter appears when you’re getting close, so you won’t be caught out mid-thought.
• Enter sends your message. Use Shift + Enter to add a new line without sending. (If you’d rather have Enter add a new line instead, you can flip that in Preferences.)

3. Send it

Press Enter, or click the Send button on the bottom right of the composer.

Your message appears at the top of the conversation, and the assistant starts working on its reply. While it’s thinking, the Send button turns into a Stop button — click it any time if you want to cut a response short.

4. Watch Chat work

Chat doesn’t just guess at an answer. It works through your question in clear steps, and it shows you what it’s doing in a small thinking view above the reply. You’ll see plain-language steps roll past, such as:

1. Conversation loaded — picking up the thread so far.
2. Intent understood — figuring out what you’re actually asking.
3. Safety checks passed — making sure the request is appropriate.
4. Information gathered — pulling in relevant material (when your question calls for it).
5. Results filtered — keeping what’s useful, dropping what isn’t.
6. Context assembled — putting together everything it needs to answer.
7. Response generated — the answer is written.
8. Response ready — formatted and ready to read.

Once it’s done, this collapses into a single summary line — something like “Thought for 2.6s” — that you can expand any time to review the steps. You don’t have to do anything during this stage; it’s there so you can see how Chat reached its answer, not just what it concluded.

Note

The steps you see depend on the question. A quick factual question skips the research steps; a question that needs to look things up will include them.

5. Read the answer

The reply streams in as it’s written, so you can start reading right away. It will be formatted for easy reading — headings, lists, and tables where they help.

Underneath the latest reply you’ll find a row of quick actions to keep the conversation moving without retyping:

Action	What it does
Compare	Shows two versions side by side so you can pick the better one
Copy	Copies the reply to your clipboard
Regenerate	Regenerates the reply from scratch

If the answer offers you choices (like A) … B) …), those turn into one-click buttons — just tap the one you want to continue.

6. Check the citations

When Chat draws on a specific source to answer you, it tells you exactly where: small numbered markers like [1] appear in the text, matching entries in a Sources Used card below the reply.

Open the Sources Used card to review everything the answer leaned on, and follow the link on an entry to open the original website or file.

This is what lets you trust an answer rather than take it on faith: you can always trace a statement back to where it came from.

No sources shown?

For a general-knowledge question like the one above, you may not see citations — there’s no specific document behind the answer. Once you start uploading your own files or turning on web search, citations show you precisely which material Chat used.

What you learned

In about a minute you:

• Found the composer and typed a question.
• Sent it with Enter (or the Send button).
• Watched Chat reason through the answer step by step.
• Read a streamed, formatted reply and used the quick actions.
• Checked citations to see where the answer came from.

Next steps

• Take the two-minute tour — see the icon rail, your conversations, and the controls around the chat box.
• Attachments and web search — ask questions about your own documents, and pull in current information from the web.
• Knowledge collections — build a reusable set of documents Chat can cite from.
• Chat modes — match how deeply Chat thinks to the task in front of you.