Chat

Your organization's own messenger: channels, direct messages and threads, with your agent teammates and your runs in the conversation.

Chat is your organization's messenger. It has public and private channels, direct messages, threads, mentions, reactions, files, voice clips, polls and search. Two things make it Peractor's own: your agent teammates are members — mention one and it answers in the thread — and your work shows up in the conversation, as runs posting into a channel and as live cards for any Peractor link.

Where it is

  • Web and desktop: Chat in the top bar, after Members. Its count is your mentions and unread direct messages; it is never added to the inbox's.
  • Mac and iPad: a Chat row in each organization's rail, or ⌘7. Conversations open as tabs, and a thread opens beside its conversation.
  • iPhone and Android: Chat in the drawer's organization rows. It opens over the app with tabs along the bottom: Chats, Threads, Later and Activity. Open a conversation, then a thread, and the tabs step aside.

On the web, the desktop app, a Mac and an iPad, the conversations list starts with Threads (the threads you follow), Later (what you saved) and Activity (what notified you). On a phone those are the tabs. Then come Starred, Channels and Direct messages. A pencil marks a conversation with an unsent draft; drafts follow you to your other devices.

Channels

Every organization starts with #general, which everyone is in. Create channel needs the Create channels permission, which everyone has unless an admin takes it away. A channel has a name (lower case, letters, numbers, - and _), a purpose, a topic, and is public or private:

  • A public channel can be read and joined by anyone in the organization. Browse channels lists them all, with their members and purpose.
  • A private channel is read only by its members, and its owners add people. A public channel can be made private; a private channel never becomes public, because that would publish what was written in private.

A channel's owners, or anyone with Manage chat, can rename it, change its topic and purpose, link a project, make it private, and archive it. An archived channel is read-only and leaves the list; its history and search stay, and Browse channels shows it behind Archived. The person who creates a channel is its owner, and an owner can make another member an owner, or take it back — so the last owner of a private channel can hand it on before leaving. Nobody joins a private channel on their own, Manage chat included: one of its owners adds them.

Direct messages

New message starts a conversation with one to nine people, an agent teammate among them if you like. The people in it are fixed: adding someone starts a new conversation instead of showing them the old one. Messaging the same people again opens the conversation you already have, and the button says Open instead of Start. The people you pick show as chips over the list, and a press on one takes them off. A long list is filed under Recent, People and Agents, with the status each has set.

Messages and threads

Return sends and Shift-Return starts a new line. The format bar — above the field on the web and the Mac, above the keyboard on the phones — makes bold, italic, strikethrough, code, links, lists, quotes and code blocks, and messages are written in the same Markdown as everywhere in Peractor. On the web and the Mac, ⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘⇧X, ⌘E, ⌘⇧C and ⌘K format the selection, and the up arrow in an empty composer edits your last message. A message of one to three emoji is drawn large.

Reply in thread keeps a side conversation under a message. Threads are one level deep, and Also send to #channel shows a reply in the channel too. You follow a thread you started, replied to or were mentioned in; Threads lists the followed ones with new replies. A thread opens at its newest replies, the message it answers above them; scroll up for older ones, however long it runs.

A message's menu (hover on a desk, a long press on a phone) has Reply in thread, Copy link, Forward…, Save for later, Pin, Make a task, Mark unread, and for your own messages Edit and Delete. An edited message says "edited". A deleted message that has replies stays as "This message was deleted" with its thread; one with none is gone. A channel's owners and anyone with Manage chat can delete other people's messages too.

A conversation's pinned messages show in a line under its header. A press goes to the one it shows and turns to the next.

Mentions and reactions

Type @ for people, roles that can be mentioned, the agent teammates in the conversation, @channel (everyone in it) and @here (everyone in it who is active). Type # for a channel and : for an emoji. A mention notifies the person even in a conversation they muted. In a conversation of more than 25 people, @channel and @here ask first. If you mention someone who isn't in a private conversation, they hear nothing, and you get a note only you can see offering to add them.

React with any emoji from the picker, which searches by name, keeps your recent ones first and remembers your skin tone. Your six most recent emoji are one press away. A message holds up to 50 different emoji.

Files and voice clips

The + at the start of the message box attaches Photos or Files (on the Mac, Files), up to ten to a message: pictures show as a grid, videos play in the conversation, and anything else opens in the file viewer. A file is up to 10 MB, or 100 MB when your Peractor keeps files in object storage. Each conversation's details list its files: the info button at the top of a conversation opens them beside it, where a thread opens (About, Members, Pins, Files and Settings), and on a phone as a page of their own.

The microphone at the end of the message box, beside the emoji button, records a voice clip of up to five minutes. Hold it to record and let go to send; slide away to cancel, or up to lock it and keep recording. On the web, the desktop app and the Mac a click locks it too, and you send or delete the clip yourself. The player plays at 1×, 1.5× or 2×. When your Peractor has a speech provider set up, the pill at the end of the clip's row shows its transcript under it; without one, there is no transcript to show. Search reads transcripts.

Links, cards and tasks

For links to other sites, Peractor fetches a preview once — the site's title, description and picture — so the people reading never contact the site themselves. The author can take a preview off.

A link to something in Peractor — a task, a run, a file or a line of code, a wiki page, a dashboard, a workflow, a project, a person, or another message — opens out into a card, read for each person as they read the message: a run's card moves through its phases as it runs. A link to something you can't see reads "No access", and shows nothing of it.

Make a task turns a message into a task: the title is its first line, the description quotes it with its link, its files come along, and the project is the channel's linked project. The task keeps the message it came from, and the message's thread says the task was made.

Polls

Poll, in the message box's +, asks a question with two to ten options. A poll can allow several choices, be anonymous (only the counts are shown, never who chose what), and close after an hour, a day, a week or on a date. You can change your vote until it closes. Its author, a channel owner or anyone with Manage chat can close it early — in a direct message, only its author — and closing posts the result in its thread.

Unread, notifications and your status

Opening a conversation reads it, on all your devices. The New line marks where you left off, and Mark unread takes you back to a message. Each conversation can notify you of All messages, Mentions only or Nothing, and can be muted: a muted conversation isn't bold and doesn't ring, but a mention still counts. A count past 999 reads 999+.

Chat notifies you of direct messages, mentions, replies in threads you follow, and — if you turn it on — reactions to your messages; each is a switch in your notification settings under Chat. They arrive as push notifications and in Chat's Activity, never in the inbox. While you're active on one device, your phone waits a minute before ringing, and stays quiet if you read the message meanwhile.

A dot on someone's picture says they're active (green) or away (hollow). Set a status — an emoji and a few words, cleared after 30 minutes, an hour, four hours, today, this week or never — and pause notifications for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours or until tomorrow, which shows a moon and holds every ring back.

Search

Search reads the public channels and the conversations you're in, archived channels included and marked. Narrow it with from:@ada, in:#eng, has:file (or link, voice, poll, pin, reaction), before:2026-10-01, after:2026-09-01 and is:thread. On the web, the desktop app, the Mac and the iPad, Chat's search opens as a palette over the conversation: type, or pick one of the filters it offers, then ↑ ↓ and Return open a message. On a phone it is a page of its own. On the web and the desktop app, ⌘K finds conversations and messages too; on the Mac and iPad it finds the conversations you're in.

Agent teammates in conversations

Add a persona to a channel like a person, or message it directly. Mentioning it in a message of yours, or writing in its direct conversation, asks it: Peractor starts a conversation run in the channel's linked project — the organization's default shared project when there is none — and its answer comes back into the thread as its own message, written as it works, with a quiet "Working" line that opens the run. Your next reply in that thread is its next turn while the run lives.

Asking needs Start runs in that project, and the persona must be one the project picked. The run is done by the persona and started by you, so it can do no more than you could. When it can't start, you get a note only you can see that says why. Messages written by workflows, personas or Peractor itself never ask a persona anything.

A run asked for in a direct message or a private channel shows what it did only to the people who were in the conversation, and to the organization's owner and Administrators. Everyone else who sees the project sees that a run happened, under a title that doesn't quote what was asked or name a private channel, and only the conversation's people can approve it.

Run updates in a channel

The Peractor chat notifier posts a run's milestones into a channel. Add it in Settings ▸ Connectors ▸ Notifiers (Manage connectors) and choose the channel — a private channel only if you're in it — then name it in a workflow's notify: as any notifier. A run's first post is a message carrying the run's card, and its later posts are replies in that message's thread.

Start a workflow from a message

An on: message trigger starts a run for new messages in the channels it names:

on: message
channels: [chn_3f1a]
contains: bug
from: { roles: [support] }
messages: roots
has: file
workflow: triage-bug

messages is roots (the channel's own, the default), replies or both. The run reads {{ event.message.text }}, {{ event.message.author }}, {{ event.message.channel }} and {{ event.message.link }}. The trigger acts as the person who set it up and stops if they leave a private channel it reads. A run it starts from a private channel is kept from anyone who wasn't in the channel, as a persona's is, and reads the thread as it stood when the message came. Edits never fire it, and neither do messages written by workflows, personas or Peractor. It starts at most 30 runs an hour unless its perHour: says otherwise, as a mail trigger does.

Calls

When your organization has a call provider installed, Start a call in a conversation's header makes a meeting starting now, hosted by you, and posts it with Join. After the call, a transcript the integration keeps is linked in the call's thread. A public channel's call goes on the organization's calendar. A private channel's or a direct message's goes on its people's own calendars, under a title that doesn't name the conversation, and keeps no files in a project.

How long messages are kept

Chat keeps messages forever unless someone with Manage chat chooses a year, 180 days, 90 days or 30 days in the organization's Chat settings. Older messages are removed every hour, their files with them.

The assistant and MCP

The assistant reads your conversations and the one you have open, finds messages, and can react, set your status or manage a channel you may manage. Anything it would post waits for your yes, because it speaks for you. So do the words it would put in front of others — a channel's name or topic, your status's text — and adding or removing someone in a private channel. MCP's chat_read and chat_write do the same under your permissions, for an app you let into Chat with Chat through apps when you connected it.