Chat - ONA.UNO Docs

Chat is where ONA.UNO becomes more than a reader. Instead of opening individual documents and scanning them yourself, you ask a question — and ONA.UNO answers it using everything in your library, with citations pointing back to the original sources.

What you can do with chat

The most natural way to use chat is to ask questions you’d otherwise spend minutes (or hours) tracking down manually:

“What were the key decisions from last week’s email threads?” — ONA.UNO pulls from your ingested emails and synthesizes an answer.
“Summarize everything I’ve saved about container gardening” — works across web clippings, notes, and documents at once.
“What did the Q2 budget discussion conclude?” — finds relevant items even if they’re scattered across different sources and dates.
“Compare what these three articles say about battery technology” — select the items first, then ask.

Chat works best when you’re looking for synthesis, connections, or answers that span multiple items. For simple lookups, search is faster. For deep understanding, chat is the tool.

Starting a conversation

Open the Chat tab in the sidebar, type your question, and press Return. That’s it.

What chat searches depends on your current context — and this is one of its most powerful features. If you’ve selected a single item, chat focuses on that item. If you’ve committed a search, chat uses only the filtered results. If nothing is selected or filtered, chat searches across all your items. This means you can narrow or broaden chat’s scope just by changing what you’re looking at in the timeline. See Scope and Context for the full details.

You can also start a chat directly from a selection or search result — no need to switch tabs first.

Citations and verification

Every chat response includes numbered citations that link back to the source items ONA.UNO used. Click a citation to jump to that item in the timeline and read its summary. Option-click (Alt-click) a citation to open the original source directly — the actual file, web page, or email.

This is important: chat answers are only as good as the context they draw from. Citations let you verify claims against the original material whenever accuracy matters.

Chat history and export

ONA.UNO keeps your chat sessions so you can return to them later. Click the history button to load, rename, or delete previous sessions. Each session also has a deep link you can copy — useful for jumping back to a specific conversation from outside the app.

When you want to take a conversation with you, use the export button to save it as a Markdown transcript, optionally including the source citations.

Model selection

You can choose which AI model powers your chat in Settings → AI → Remote Models. Different models have different strengths — some are faster, some produce more nuanced answers. The cost per conversation depends on the model you choose and how much context ONA.UNO sends with each question.

Advanced AI actions

Each successful chat exchange (your question plus the AI’s response) counts as one Advanced AI action. On Free, you have a monthly quota; on Pro, there’s no limit.

Chat with Knowledgebase — where you ask questions about ONA.UNO itself rather than your content — is always free and does not count toward your quota.

Actions are only counted when they complete successfully. Cancelled requests, failed requests, and loading previous chat history never count. You can always see your remaining quota in the status bar.

If you run out of Advanced AI actions on the Free plan, ONA.UNO lets you know and offers an upgrade path: Settings → License → Upgrade to Pro.