Shared chats in a workspace

When a workspace has more than one person in it, a chat there is one of two things: shared with everyone in the workspace, or private to you. This page explains what each one means, who can read which chats, and how a conversation behaves when several people are in it at once.

Turning them on. Shared chats are off until somebody switches them on, under Settings → Beta features → Shared team chats. Two things about that switch are deliberate:

• Only the workspace's owner can do it. Everyone else sees the setting but flipping it changes nothing for a workspace they don't own. Turning shared chats on decides who may read a team's conversations, which is not a personal preference — so it is the owner's call, not each member's.
• It changes nothing about chats that already exist. Everything you have written so far stays private, permanently. The switch only makes the shared-or-private choice available on new chats.

If it is off, chats work exactly as described in Chats and nothing else here applies to you.

Shared or private — a choice made once

When shared chats are on, pressing + asks which kind of chat you want before it makes one: Shared chat — "Everyone in this workspace can read it" — or Private chat — "Only you can read it". Nothing is created until you pick, and closing the menu creates nothing.

Under both is the sentence that matters most: "Either way the agent works on the same workspace files." Private means the conversation is private, not the work. A private chat still reads and writes the same workspace files as everyone else's — the assistant is working in the same place. What stays yours is the conversation.

The choice is made once and can't be changed afterwards. There is no way to make an existing chat shared, or an existing shared chat private, and no way to move one — so you are asked when the chat starts and never again. If you want the other kind, start a new chat.

If you are the only person in a workspace there is no choice to make, and + simply starts a chat.

A chat that starts any other way is private. Chats don't only begin at +: you can start one by typing into an empty message box, by tapping a button in one of your dashboards, from the home-screen widget, or by sharing a file or a link into the app from another app. Nobody is asked which kind those should be — so they are always private, even if the last chat you opened was a shared one. If you want one of them shared, start it with + and pick.

You can always tell which kind of chat you're in. A shared chat carries a small people icon just before its name at the top of the screen; a private one doesn't. That marker is the whole signal — there is no notification when a colleague opens or reads a chat, so the icon is how you know, at a glance, whether what you type next is only yours.

What about the chats that were already here?

They stay private. Nothing you wrote before is readable by anyone else.

Switching shared chats on changes nothing about the chats that already exist, and nothing is opened up after the fact. The only chats anyone else can read are the ones somebody deliberately starts as Shared, from the moment shared chats are switched on for the workspace.

A shared chat appears in every colleague's list and they can open it and take part. Your private chats never appear in anyone else's list at all — there is no marker for them to see, because there is no row.

Finding a chat: All, Shared and Mine

Tap the chat title at the top to open the list of chats. In a workspace with shared chats on, it has three tabs:

• All — every chat in the workspace you're allowed to see. This is where the list opens, because it is the one tab that can never look empty.
• Shared — the chats everyone in the workspace can read. A private chat never appears here, and neither does anything you wrote before shared chats were switched on.
• Mine — the chats you started, plus any shared chat you've taken a turn in. Your private chats live here and nowhere else.

A tab you're not on carries a small count of chats active in the last 24 hours that it would show and the tab you're on does not, so there's a hint when something is happening elsewhere. Standing on All there is never a count, because All is already showing everything.

Each row leads with whoever has been working in the chat, then when it was last touched, then its title if it has one. A row shows what kind of chat it is — Shared chat or Private chat — and a chat with the assistant running right now is marked Working now. A running chat keeps its place in the list rather than jumping to the top, so the list doesn't rearrange itself while you're reading it.

What the names on a row do and do not prove

The names and initials on a chat row are a convenience for recognising a conversation, and it's worth knowing exactly what they mean.

They mean: this person has started or stopped a piece of work in this chat. That is what's recorded.

They do not mean anything about who has read it. In particular:

• Someone who typed a message that is still waiting to send doesn't appear.
• Anyone who has only read the chat doesn't appear at all. Reading leaves no trace, on this row or anywhere else.
• Someone who only pressed the stop button on a colleague's work does appear.

So the names answer "who has been working here", not "who has seen this". They are not a record of access, and shouldn't be treated as one. If it matters that a conversation isn't read by colleagues, the answer is a private chat, not an empty row of names.

Two smaller details about the names themselves. They come from your teammates' current profile names, so if someone renames themselves, older messages follow. If two people in a chat have the same name, one of them is shown with a number after it so the two are always distinguishable. Someone who has left the workspace is shown as ‹their name› (former member), and someone with no name set reads as Unnamed teammate.

If you can only view

If your role in the workspace is viewer, you can read shared chats and you cannot write in them. Instead of the message box you'll see: "You have view-only access to this workspace, so you can read this chat but not send messages. Ask an owner or admin for edit access."

The box is removed rather than greyed out, deliberately — a box that accepts typing and then refuses to send is worse than no box. A viewer also can't answer the assistant's questions, stop somebody's work, or delete a chat. Your own private chats are unaffected: those run in your own space and you can chat in them as always. See Sharing & inviting people for what each role can do.

If your access changes, it takes effect on your next message rather than at your next login.

Several people in one chat

A shared chat can have several people in it at the same time, and the assistant still works on one thing at a time. That shapes almost everything below.

Waking up. The first person to open the workspace's shared chats on a given day waits a few seconds while it starts: "Waking the team's workspace…". You can type through it — your message is held and sent as soon as it's ready. Everyone after that gets it warm.

Your message waiting its turn. If a colleague's request is running when you send yours, yours waits and says so — for example "Aliya is working — your message will send when their turn finishes." It goes out on its own the moment the current work finishes; there is nothing to retry. A waiting message is visible only to you until it actually sends, so if you're wondering why a colleague hasn't reacted to it, that's usually why.

When the assistant asks a question. Sometimes it needs a decision before it can carry on. In a shared chat the question appears as a highlighted block just above the message box, with an Answer button that takes you to it.

Two things about that are specific to shared chats:

• Typing does not answer the question. In a chat with only you in it, typing an answer works. In a shared chat it doesn't — what you type is sent as a new message instead, and the message box says so while a question is open: "Answer above — this sends a new message". The reason is that otherwise an unrelated message from one person would silently answer a question meant for someone else, and the assistant would carry on believing it had an answer nobody meant to give. Use the Answer button.
• Anyone in the chat can answer it — it isn't reserved for whoever asked. If messages are waiting behind the question, the block says so too: "Your message is waiting for this question to be answered. Anyone here can answer it." Answering releases them.

Two people answering at once. The first answer through wins, and it's decided cleanly rather than by luck — nobody's instruction is half-applied. If yours wasn't the first, you're told who was: "Aliya answered first — your message was sent to the chat instead." Your words aren't lost; they're posted into the conversation as an ordinary message, and the question shows Answered by Aliya so the two things can't be confused.

Stopping. Anyone in a shared chat can stop the work that's running, including work someone else started. There's no confirmation step, so it's worth a word to the room first.

Related

• Chats — how chats work generally: starting one, history, attachments, and what the assistant's status means.
• Sharing & inviting people — inviting people into a workspace and what each role can do.
• Workspaces — what a workspace holds, and how the assistant works inside one.