Chat Features Overview

Open WebUI provides a comprehensive set of chat features designed to enhance your interactions with AI models. This page provides an overview of the key chat capabilities, with links to dedicated pages for more detailed information.

Core Chat Features

• 📁 Folders & Projects: Transform folders into powerful project workspaces with custom system prompts and attached knowledge bases.

• 🔗 URL Parameters: Configure chat sessions through URL parameters, enabling quick setup of models, tools, and other features.

• ⚙️ Chat Parameters: Control system prompts and advanced parameters at different levels (per-chat, per-account, or per-model), and fill placeholders in a shared system prompt with chat or user variables.

• ✨ Autocomplete: AI-powered text prediction that helps you write prompts faster using a task model.

• 🗨️ Chat Sharing: Share conversations locally or via the Open WebUI Community platform with controllable privacy settings.

• ⬇️ Response Auto-Scroll: The view follows a response down the page as it is generated. Turn it off with Response Auto-Scroll in Settings > Interface to keep the scroll position where you put it, which is useful when you want to read earlier parts of a long answer while the rest is still streaming.

• 📎 Default Upload Mode: How a file you attach in a chat is handled before you touch anything. Settings > Interface > File > Default Upload Mode switches between Using Focused Retrieval, the default, where the file is chunked and searched by relevance, and Using Entire Document, where its whole content goes into the conversation. It sets the starting point for each new attachment; you can still change an individual file's mode by clicking it after it is attached. See Retrieval Modes for what the two modes mean.

• 🍴 Fork a Chat: Branch a conversation into an independent copy from any assistant response. The Fork chat action on a message copies the history from the start of the conversation up to that point into a new chat titled <original title> (fork), keeping the original's folder and pinned state, so you can take a different direction without touching the original. Forking requires the chat-import permission, and is unavailable while a response is still streaming.

• 🔍 History & Search: Navigate and search your previous conversations, or allow models to search them autonomously via native tools.

• 👁️ Sidebar Hover Previews: Resting the pointer on a chat in the sidebar opens a small preview of its most recent messages, scrolled to the end, so you can identify a conversation without opening it. Only one preview is shown at a time, and moving to another row replaces it.

• 🕒 Temporal Awareness: How models understand time and date, including native tools for precise time calculations.

• 🎙️ Voice Mode: Start a hands-free voice conversation with your model using the Voice Mode button. The overlay includes a mute/unmute toggle to temporarily silence your microphone without ending the session, useful in noisy or public environments.

• 🧠 Reasoning & Thinking Models: Specialized support for models that generate internal chains of thought using thinking tags.

• 💬 Follow-Up Prompts: Automatic generation of suggested follow-up questions after model responses.

• ⏱️ Automations: Schedule prompts to run automatically (hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/custom RRULE) and manage recurring runs.

• ✅ Task Management: Let agentic models keep a structured task/todo list in chat for multi-step workflows and transparent progress tracking.

• 🤖 Sub-agents: Let a model delegate focused work to parallel sub-agents that run the same model and tools, and report back.

• ⏰ Timers: One-shot timers that send a prompt back into the chat when they fire, so a model can pick something up later.

• 🔔 Notifications: Per-user webhook targets that notify you when a chat finishes or fails, a channel message arrives, or a calendar alert triggers, plus a notify tool the model can call.

• ⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts: Rebindable shortcuts for the common actions, managed in Settings > Keyboard.

• Skill Mentions: Use $ in the chat input to mention and activate Skills on-the-fly, injecting their manifests into the conversation.

• Chat Input Commands: Typing a trigger character in the chat input opens a suggestion menu:

  Trigger	Offers
  /	Built-in commands (below), plus your Prompts and Skills
  @	Models to switch to, plus attachable context: knowledge bases, collections, files, folders, and web or YouTube URLs
  #	Attach knowledge and files
  $	Mention and activate skills
  :	Emoji

  / and @ used to offer only prompts and only models respectively; both now cover much more.

• Built-in Slash Commands: three commands act on the current chat. They only appear once the chat has messages, and are typed on their own rather than sent to the model:

  Command	What it does
  /compact	Compacts the conversation now, instead of waiting for it to cross the threshold. Only offered when Context Compaction is enabled, and not while a response is generating. It reports what happened: the context was compacted, or it was skipped because the chat is too short, empty, or compaction is disabled.
  /status	Opens a status panel for the chat showing Context usage, Queued messages, Tasks currently running, and the Chat ID.
  /fork	Copies the conversation up to the current message into a new chat, so you can branch off without disturbing the original.

  /fork requires the Chat Import permission (chat.import, allowed by default; admins always pass). The command still appears in the menu without it, and reports Access prohibited when run.

• Writing & Content Blocks: Responses from models that include colon-fence blocks (e.g., :::writing, :::code_execution, :::search_results) are automatically rendered as formatted content in a styled container with a copy button. This is commonly used by newer OpenAI models to distinguish different types of output (prose, code results, search results) from the main response text.

• Structured Response Editing: Clicking the edit icon on an assistant response that contains tool calls, reasoning blocks, or code-interpreter output opens a structured editor instead of a plain textarea. Each output item (text, thought, tool call, code block, web/file/computer search) becomes its own collapsible field, and a JSON toggle exposes the underlying OpenAI Responses API payload for direct editing. Reasoning/thinking blocks are editable here too. The previous textarea editor reduced them to a non-editable <details> placeholder. Plain text-only responses keep the original textarea behavior. Editing rewrites the message's output array; Open WebUI re-derives the displayed content (including <details> blocks for thoughts and tool calls) on save, so the rendered message stays consistent.