Creating conversations

Use a conversation to analyze your documents, getting on-demand information from documents of nearly any type or format.

Conversations can be created in your personal workspace.

• From the homepage Chats panel, click Create.

• In Workspaces, select your personal workspace, then click Create > Chat.

An empty conversation opens. While the chat panel on the right displays some sample prompts, your first step before you can submit a meaningful query is uploading files to your conversation.

Adding files

In an empty conversation, you can use the center pane to upload files. Conversations can contain up to 500 files, with a single-upload limit of 100 files.

You can upload a variety of file types in various supported languages. You can also add documents from connected drives.

Upload files to your empty conversation by doing one of the following:

• Drag and drop files into the center pane.

• Click the links present in the Select files or folders, browse drives, or paste a URL text in the center pane to open your local file explorer, the AI Hub file explorer, or the URL upload dialog.

  When using URL upload, you can upload files available at a URL or you can import a webpage. Content uploaded by URL is captured as a PDF, meaning the content doesn’t refresh and can’t reflect future changes. Inline links might not be preserved. URL upload is supported for public websites without paywalls or loading animations.

Uploaded files are digitized and stored in your default drive. After uploading files, two new panels are visible alongside your chat panel:

• The document list on the left displays all documents uploaded to the conversation. From here, you can:

  • Upload more files to the conversation by clicking the Add files icon .

  • Permanently delete selected files by clicking the Delete selection icon .

  • Control your message scope—the set of documents you’re conversing with in each query—by selecting and deselecting files.

• The document view in the center displays the file selected in the document list. The view pane includes a toolbar, auto-hidden by default, with controls for viewing the selected document, including image or text-only views, keyword search, and page selection.

Hide the document list and document view by clicking the X at the top of the view pane. To bring both panels back, click the Open file panel icon floating in the top right of the chat panel.

File digitization

All uploaded files are digitized according to the default digitization processes. If encountering low-quality responses or using documents that might benefit from advanced digitization options, you can modify your conversation’s digitization settings.

To access digitization settings, click the dropdown indicator next to the conversation name, then select Digitization settings. Here, you can preview how changes impact machine-readable text with up to three documents from your conversation. The before-and-after preview shows a heat map overlay using a red-to-green gradient to represent OCR confidence for each word. Additionally, you can see a summary confidence score for the entire document.

Any time you change digitization settings, all files in your conversation are redigitized.

Choose the digitization settings suitable for your documents and AI Hub subscription.

• Tables — Provides better results when extracting information from tables, and enables table highlighting, which lets you enlarge, copy, or download highlighted tables directly from the document viewer.

• Checkboxes — Provides better results when extracting information from checkboxes.

  Table and checkbox recognition change the OCR processor used, which slows digitization slightly and might impact accuracy, particularly with less common languages. Enable tables and checkboxes only if needed.

• Non-Latin characters Commercial & Enterprise — Enables support for many common languages that use writing systems other than the Latin alphabet (a, b, c…). Support for non-Latin characters is offered in standard and advanced language sets. For details, see Supported languages.

• Process spreadsheets natively — Processes Excel spreadsheets in their native file format instead of converting to PDF. This option offers better results for wide tables, but doesn’t support embedded objects or source highlighting in results.

• Treat files as images Commercial & Enterprise — Digitizes files as they appear, discarding any embedded machine-readable text. This option often provides better results for documents that use non-Latin characters, handwritten text, and visually complex documents.

• Pages Commercial & Enterprise — Limits digitization to specified pages.

Conversing with your documents

When you enter a message in the chat box, the model provides a response and indicates which documents it referenced when generating the answer. Select one of the listed documents to open it in the document view panel and see where the model found relevant information.

To get the most out of a conversation, it helps to understand what functionality is supported. For tips and a variety of sample queries, see Effectively analyzing documents.

Defining message scope

Message scope is the set of documents that you’re conversing with in each query. By default, the message scope for a query is all files uploaded to the conversation, but you can modify this to narrow your query to single or specific documents.

The chat box displays your current message scope at the bottom, such as Message scope: All files or Message scope: 5 files. For more details, open the document list: the files selected in the document list are your current message scope. Edit your message scope by selecting and deselecting files in the document list. Click Select all or Clear to quickly select or deselect all.

Using research mode

Various models are supported in conversations. Each model has different capabilities and costs.

The advanced or multistep model is automatically selected based on message scope, while research mode can be manually enabled. Research mode uses a more powerful variant of the multistep model and is suited for complex reasoning queries, but can result in longer execution times. Research mode also enables the use of visual reasoning.

• If the query is directed to a single document, the advanced model is automatically used.

• If the query is directed to multiple documents, the multistep model is automatically used.

• Regardless of your message scope, you can enable research mode for any query by turning on the Research mode toggle in the chat box.

Providing feedback

You can provide feedback on low-quality responses by hovering over the response and clicking the thumbs-down icon . Your feedback is used to improve model quality and might be viewed by Instabase.

Information captured when submitting feedback includes your user ID, the query, the response, and any details you choose to provide. If you add a feedback message, don’t include any personally identifiable or sensitive information.

Deleting conversations

Deleting a conversation permanently deletes the conversation itself as well as your chat history.

• In Workspaces, open your personal workspace and locate the conversation to delete. Click the overflow icon then select Delete conversation. Click Delete to confirm.

• In a conversation, click the dropdown indicator next to the conversation name, then select Delete conversation.