Chat Overview
Brief Chat navigates you to answers about your product, customers, and strategy—backed by your actual data.
Brief Chat navigates you to answers about your product, customers, work pipeline, and strategy—backed by your actual data. Every decision is informed. Every builder stays aligned.
Where to Find Chat
Chat meets you wherever you work:
- Web app — Always available in a panel on the right side of the app. Click the chat icon to open or close it, from any page in Brief.
- Slack — DM Brief directly for the full agent experience: streaming answers with a collapsible reasoning trace, decision capture, and file understanding. See Slack Integration.
- Microsoft Teams — Chat with Brief in Teams with rich Adaptive Cards, thread context, and tool-approval cards. See Microsoft Teams Integration.
- Mobile app — Chat on the go, including by voice. See Brief Mobile.
- Chrome extension — The same presets and chat experience alongside whatever you're browsing.
The same product context powers every surface, so an answer in Slack draws on the same data as an answer in the web app.
What Chat Can Do
Navigate Your Product Graph
- Get your Product Graph, current state, features, personas, research signals
- Understand what's built, what's planned, and what's shipped
- Track work pipeline and velocity
Document Management
- Create, read, update, and delete documents in Brief
- Write to connected tools — Create docs in Notion, Confluence, or Google Drive
- Search across all your documentation
Writing & Creation
- Write PRDs, specs, and user stories in Brief or connected doc tools
- Create tickets in Linear, Jira, or Asana
- Generate documentation from existing context
Decision Support
- Log decisions with context and rationale
- Search decision history
- Get decision context for strategic questions
Cross-App Reasoning
- Synthesize information across ALL connected integrations simultaneously
- Answer questions like "What are customers asking for that we haven't built?" (pulls from Fireflies + Linear + GitHub)
- Connect dots between strategy docs, customer feedback, and shipped features
- Query your databases — Ask questions answered by read-only SQL against connected Supabase or PostgreSQL databases
Working with Files
Chat understands the files you're already working with:
- Paste screenshots — Paste an image straight into the composer and it attaches automatically
- Attach documents — Drag and drop or use the + button for PDFs, images, and Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
- @mention Brief documents — Type
@to pull any Brief document into the conversation as context
Up to 10 files per message, 10 MB each.
Choosing a Model
A model picker in the chat composer lets you choose which model answers you. Claude Sonnet 5 is the standard and the best balance of speed and intelligence for most questions; other Claude models are selectable when you want deeper reasoning on a hard problem.
How Chat Works
Multi-Turn Conversations
Chat maintains full conversation history. You can:
- Ask follow-up questions
- Drill deeper into answers
- Build on previous context
Conversations are saved automatically and can be resumed later.
Real-Time vs. Synced Data
| Data Type | Freshness |
|---|---|
| Brief documents & decisions | Real-time |
| Integration data (Linear, GitHub, etc.) | Live queries when asked |
| Product graph | Updated by background agents (not real-time) |
| Dashboard metrics | From last sync |
Read & Write Across Your Stack
| Tool | Read | Write |
|---|---|---|
| Brief | ✅ All data | ✅ Full CRUD |
| Notion, Confluence, Google Docs | ✅ Search & read | ✅ Create & update |
| Linear, Jira, Asana | ✅ Issues, projects, sprints | ✅ Create tickets, update issues |
| GitHub | ✅ Repos, files, PRs | ⚠️ Read-only |
| PostHog | ✅ Events, funnels | ⚠️ Read-only |
| Fireflies, Fathom, Granola | ✅ Transcripts | ⚠️ Read-only |
| Supabase, PostgreSQL | ✅ Read-only SQL queries | ⚠️ Read-only |
Chat can only see the tools you've connected—more integrations mean richer answers. Browse the full list in the Integrations Overview.
Empty State & First Use
When you first open chat, you'll see a welcome message with preset prompts—pre-built questions matched to your context. Presets are contextual: which ones appear depends on the page you're on, the tools you've connected, and how long you've been using Brief. If you've been away a few days, a catch-up preset offers to summarize what you missed.
Click a preset to get started, or type your own question.
Conversation Limits
No explicit character limit on messages, but there's a context window limit from the model. As a long conversation approaches that limit, Brief automatically compacts earlier context so the conversation keeps going—no need to start over.
Managing Conversations
Conversation History
- Recent conversations appear in the sidebar, sorted by most recent
- Access and search older conversations through the History view (clock icon in header)
- Conversations stored indefinitely
Actions
- Copy any answer — one click copies it to your clipboard, ready to paste into your docs or messages
- Regenerate last response — ⟳ button appears on hover over assistant message
- Edit and resend your own messages — pencil icon appears on hover (not available on messages with attachments)
- Delete entire conversation — Trash icon (cannot delete individual messages)
What's Next?
Ready to start using chat?
- Getting Started with Presets — Learn how contextual presets work
- Example Prompts — See what questions work well
- Tips for Better Answers — Best practices for effective prompts