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).

• ✨ 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.

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

• 🕒 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.

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

• 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.