Starting Conversations

The Chat tab is your main way to interact with Atlas. Type a message, press Enter, and Atlas responds — using your notes, memory, and tools to give you answers that are actually relevant to your life.

Note

AI chat requires a Talk plan or an active free trial. Local features (vault, search, CRM) work without a subscription.

Sending Your First Message

Open the Chat tab and type anything in the message box at the bottom. Press Enter to send (or Shift + Enter for a new line).

Atlas will:

1. Search your vault for notes related to what you asked
2. Build a response using those notes as background context
3. Use tools if needed — reading files, creating notes, looking things up
4. Stream the reply back to you as it’s generated

You don’t need to phrase things in any special way. Talk to Atlas the same way you’d talk to a knowledgeable assistant who knows your notes and preferences.

What Atlas Can Do During a Conversation

Atlas has access to over 39 tools it can use without you asking explicitly. During a conversation you might see Atlas:

• Read a file — pulling up the contents of a note to answer your question
• Create or update a note — writing something down so you don’t have to
• Add a task — dropping a to-do into your daily note
• Search your vault — finding relevant information from across your notes
• Remember a fact — saving something to long-term memory for future conversations
• Check your calendar — looking up upcoming events
• Get the weather — if you’ve set your location in Settings

When Atlas uses a tool, you’ll see a small tool-call indicator appear in the chat as it works. The final response arrives once all the tool calls are complete.

Tip

Ask Atlas to search your vault, create notes, manage tasks, remember facts, or check your calendar — all from the chat. You don’t need to navigate to separate tabs for most of these things.

The Context Indicator

At the top of the chat panel, you’ll see a small context indicator showing how full the AI’s context window is:

Color	Meaning
Green	Plenty of room — Atlas has full context available
Yellow	Getting full — older messages may be summarized soon
Red	Near the limit — Atlas will start compacting history

When the context window fills up, Atlas automatically summarizes older parts of the conversation so the chat can continue. Before doing that, it saves any important facts to your long-term memory so nothing is lost.

You don’t need to manage this yourself — it’s automatic. But if you see yellow or red, it’s a good sign the conversation has been going for a while and starting a new chat might give you a cleaner experience.

Tips for Great Conversations

• Be specific — the more context you give, the better the response. “Summarize my notes on the Henderson project” beats “what do I know about that project?”
• Ask follow-up questions — Atlas remembers the full conversation, so you can build on what was just said
• Let Atlas use tools — if you ask Atlas to create something, it’ll do it directly rather than just telling you how
• Start a new chat when switching topics — this keeps context clean and responses focused

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Next: How Context Works