Chat
Ask questions in Astell chat and get answers with citations from your own workspace data.
Chat is how you ask your workspace questions. Behind it sits Astell Search, the same permission-aware index that powers everything else, so answers come from your team's actual messages, documents, tickets, and meetings, with citations you can open.
Start a conversation
Open the chat panel and start typing, or pick one of the suggested prompts (for example, a summary of what your team is working on).
Ask in plain language. Good questions name the thing you care about: a project, a customer, a decision, a timeframe. You do not need to remember where the answer lives.
Read the answer and open its citations to see the exact sources it came from. Every claim in an answer traces back to a real artifact you are permitted to see.
Conversations are saved as threads. You can rename, archive, or delete a thread from its menu, and pick any past thread up where you left off.
What chat can do
Beyond answering questions, chat uses tools against your workspace when the question calls for it:
- Document search and discovery: finds and reads the documents relevant to your question, with filters for source and time.
- People and company lookup: pulls together what your workspace knows about a person or company, from your contacts and connected sources.
- Summaries: turns a thread, a document set, or a stretch of activity into a readable summary.
When a request is ambiguous, Astell may ask you short clarifying questions before it commits to an answer. Answer them, pick an option, or type your own; you can also cancel and rephrase.
Models
Chat runs on a set of models with different speed and depth tradeoffs; which models are available depends on your plan. The standard model is included on every plan; advanced models are available on paid plans. See chat models for the current lineup and Memory and Ultra mode for how deeper reasoning works.
Usage
Chat draws from your plan's monthly token pool on any model. Searching and browsing your indexed data does not consume tokens; generating answers does. See What costs tokens and your workspace's usage view under Workspace settings → Usage.
If an answer looks off, check its citations first. Astell only answers from sources it can show you; when the sources are thin, the honest answer is usually "not much in the workspace about this." See hallucinations for how Astell keeps answers grounded.