Using Chat

Groupthink offers the ability to chat via text in real-time with the members of your organization, your AI Employees, and with your default Groupthink Meeting Assistant via @Groupthink to add additional intelligence to any conversation.

Types of Chats

Groupthink offers chat in the following ways:

Private Chats

  • With AI Employees (each AI Employee has its own dedicated chat room)
  • With Groupthink Assistant (like ChatGPT but with access to all your spoken and written company info stored within Groupthink)
  • Direct messages (DMs) with 1 other individual
  • Private group chat rooms (where you invite specific people)

Organization Chats

  • Organization-wide chat rooms (where the whole company can choose to join and participate)

Leveraging Groupthink AI in Chat

Groupthink Chat is powered by our built-in AI that's here to make your conversations smarter. Whether you're brainstorming ideas, seeking quick insights, or need help clarifying a point, our AI is ready to jump in and enhance your chat experience.

How It Works

  • Direct Interaction:
    Simply type @groupthink followed by your query or command, and our AI will join the conversation with context-aware responses.

  • Contextual Assistance:
    The AI leverages your organization's stored information to provide tailored answers and suggestions, ensuring that its input is always relevant to your work.

  • Collaborative Conversations:
    Use the AI to facilitate discussions by offering insights, tracking decisions, or providing additional data—making both real-time and asynchronous communication more effective.

Chatting with AI Employees

AI Employees are custom assistants that you create to help with specific tasks in your organization. Each AI Employee gets its own dedicated chat room where you can interact with it directly.

Getting Started with AI Employee Chat

When you create a new AI Employee, you're automatically added to a new chat room with just you and the AI Employee. This room works just like any other chat room, but with some powerful additional capabilities:

  1. Access to Company Knowledge: Your AI Employee can access information from your organization's documents, meeting transcripts, agendas, and other data stored in Groupthink.

  2. Skill Execution: When you ask your AI Employee to perform tasks like drafting emails, creating documents, or searching meeting notes, it can execute these actions using the connections you've granted it.

  3. Task Tracking: When your AI Employee performs work based on your chat requests, it will create a Task to track this work and provide you with a link to view the Task's progress.

Example Interactions

Here are some examples of how you can interact with your AI Employees in chat:

  • Information Retrieval: "Tell me about the meeting with the engineers that I missed this morning"
  • Email Management: "Draft an email to the design team asking for an update on the new landing page."
  • GitHub Interaction: "Create a new issue in our API repository about the performance problem we're seeing with user authentication."
  • Meeting Preparation: "Summarize the key points from our last three weekly team meetings to help me prepare for tomorrow's strategy session."

Sharing AI Employee Chat Rooms

You can add other members of your organization to an AI Employee's chat room by clicking the "Share" button in the room. This allows multiple team members to collaborate with the AI Employee in the same conversation.

Notifications

Groupthink will:

  • Turn the name of a chat room bold when there are new messages you haven't viewed yet
  • Send a desktop notification when there are new messages

Managing Rooms

Creating a New Room

You can create an unlimited number of chat rooms in Groupthink.

  1. In the left-hand navigation, go to the section labeled "Chat" and click the + button
  2. Select "New Room..." from the list
  3. Give your room a name
  4. Set the room permissions to Protected (Can only be viewed or joined by invitation) or Organization (Anyone in the Organization may discover, view, or join)
  5. Click "Create" and you'll be taken into your new room

Sharing a Room

You are the Owner of rooms you create, and can share them with others. Rooms that are set to have Organization permissions are discoverable, but no one will be added to a chat room unless they join it or accept an invitation from you.

Sending Email Invites to a Room

To invite someone to a room:

  1. Enter the chat room you want to share
  2. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right side of the chat room
  3. Add the email address(es) of who you want to invite, separated by commas
  4. Click "Invite All" to send the invitations

Granting Permissions to Room Members

Room Owners have the option to change the permissions of other room members:

  1. Enter the chat room you want to share
  2. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right side of the chat room
  3. Find the user whose permissions you want to change in the list of Room Members
  4. Select the new role you want to assign from the dropdown menu to the right of their name (options: Participant, Owner)
  5. IMPORTANT: If you make someone an owner of a room you will not be able to change them back to a Participant or delete them from the room members

Removing Room Members

Room Owners have the ability to remove room members:

  1. Enter the chat room you want to share
  2. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right side of the chat room
  3. Find the user whose permissions you want to change in the list of Room Members
  4. Click the red trash can icon to the right of their name (next to the drop-down menu) to remove them
  5. IMPORTANT: Removing a room member will not ban them from re-joining the room, so if you want to limit the room to only members you have explicitly invited make sure the Room Access is also set to "Specific Individuals"

Joining Chats

You can join any existing rooms that are open to your Organization

  1. In the left-hand navigation, go to the section labeled "Chat" and click the + button
  2. Select "Join Existing Room..." from the list
  3. You'll see a list of all the rooms that are available for you to join
  4. Click "Join" next to any rooms to want to join, and it will be added to your sidebar navigation

Leave Chats

We don't currently have support for leaving a room once you've joined it, but you can ask the room's Owner to remove you.

To find the room Owner, enter the chat room and click "Share" to see the owner listed all the top of the room's members.

Managing Direct Messages

Direct Messages are private chats between two or more individuals that are not discoverable across your organization

Creating a New Direct Message

You can create an unlimited number of direct messages in Groupthink.

  1. In the left-hand navigation, go to the section labeled "Chat" and click the + button
  2. Select "New Direct Message..." from the list
  3. Select the person you want to start messaging directly
  4. Click "Create" and you'll be taken into your new room

Changing Permissions of Direct Messages

Direct messages have sharing that works the same way as in other chat rooms.

IMPORTANT: If you change the permissions of a DM conversation to "Anyone in the organization" it will be discoverable and joinable by anyone, and they will also be able to see all your chat history. Use with care!

Known Issues / Missing Features

Chat is a newly released feature of Groupthink, and we still have a lot more we want to build to make it awesome for you! Feel free to drop a note to support@groupthink.com anytime with your questions, ideas, or concerns using chat

You may notice the following limitations to Groupthink chat:

  • No ability to remove yourself from a room
  • No ability to search
  • No way to see a badge indicating the number of new messages in a room
  • No way to see a badge indicating the number of overall new messages across all chats