AI & Agents

Chat & the AI Assistant

Work with AI in conversations — @ai mentions, files, and more.

Chat is where you and your AI work together in Portablemind. Every conversation is a shared space that can include you, your teammates, and AI participants — the AI joins as a peer collaborator, not a separate tool you switch to. Ask a quick question in a private conversation with the AI Assistant, or bring the AI into a team discussion exactly when you need it.

The same conversation model powers everything: one-on-one chats with the AI, team channels, direct messages, and conversations that agents participate in. Messages arrive in real time, conversations are organized and persistent, and the AI has access to your workspace context — so its answers reflect your actual data, files, and history.

Talking to the AI with @ai mentions

How you talk to the AI depends on the kind of conversation:

In a direct AI Assistant conversation, every message is treated as a prompt — just type and the AI replies. No mention needed.
In team channels and direct messages, the AI responds when you mention it. Start your message with @ai and the AI will reply in the thread. (The mention needs to be at the beginning of the message — if you put it in the middle, the composer offers to reformat for you.) Messages without an @ai mention are ordinary human messages — they're saved to the conversation but don't trigger an AI response.

This is what makes mixed human-AI conversations work: your team can discuss freely and pull the AI in only when it's wanted.

Start a conversation with @ai

Mention syntax

The basic @ai mention uses your workspace's default model. You can also target a specific model, or ask for conversation compaction (a summarized context window — useful in very long conversations):

@ai                       Uses the default AI model
@ai:model_name            Uses a specific AI model
@ai/compact               Default model, with conversation compaction
@ai:model_name/compact    Specific model, with conversation compaction

Examples:

@ai Can you help me analyze this data? — default model responds.
@ai:claude-sonnet Please review this code — a specific model responds.
@ai:gpt-4/compact Summarize our conversation — a specific model responds using a compacted view of the conversation.

The models available to mention are the ones configured for your workspace — see Setting up AI providers.

Tip: In long-running conversations, /compact keeps responses fast and focused by summarizing earlier history instead of resending all of it.

Multi-member conversations

Conversations aren't limited to you and one AI. A single conversation can include:

Multiple human members — teammates added to the conversation, each with role-based access.
AI models — mentioned on demand with @ai, as described above.
AI agents — persistent, named agents that are members of the conversation and can be mentioned by name, take on work, and report back. See Building AI Agents.

This makes chat the natural home for human-AI teamwork: a project channel might hold a design discussion between three people, an @ai request to summarize the thread, and a task handed to an agent — all in one place. Everyone (human and AI) sees the same conversation history, and the AI's contributions are visible to the whole group.

File attachments

You can attach files directly to conversations, and the AI can read them. Supported formats include PDFs, Word documents (DOCX), Markdown and plain text, images (PNG, JPG), PowerPoint presentations, and video files (MP4, WebM, MOV). Attach a contract and ask @ai to summarize it, drop in a screenshot for analysis, or share a deck and ask for feedback on it.

Attach files to a conversation

Attached files also live in your workspace's file system, so they stay available beyond the conversation — see Working with files.

Memory across conversations

Conversations feed the platform's persistent AI memory. Preferences you express, decisions your team makes, and solutions the AI discovers are remembered and recalled in future conversations — so the AI you talk to next week knows what you told it this week. Nothing is required from you; capture and recall are automatic.

Connecting external systems

Conversations can also receive messages from outside Portablemind through inbound webhooks — for example, a monitoring system posting alerts into a channel, or an external application feeding events into a conversation. A webhook message can even include an @ai mention, so an incoming alert can trigger an immediate AI analysis in the thread.

Webhooks are created per conversation and each has a unique URL.

Warning: Webhook URLs contain unique keys and should be treated as sensitive. Store them securely and rotate them if compromised.

For API-level details, see the API guide.

Building AI Agents AI Memory