Chat Replies: Point at the Message You Mean
Reply to an earlier message in Scholarly chat, or to one sentence you select in an answer, so chat knows exactly what your follow-up is about.
Forty messages into a chat about a lease agreement, you type "can you give an example of that?" You mean the sentence about interest in an answer from ten minutes ago. Chat has to work out what "that" is, and in a long working chat it can pick the wrong thing: the latest answer, or a different point in the same answer.
Starting today you can reply to an earlier message in Scholarly chat. A reply attaches the message, or the exact words you selected, to your follow-up. Chat reads "this", "that", and "it" as the text you pointed at.
Three Ways to Reply
Reply to an answer. Under a finished answer, press Reply in the row of actions (next to copy and listen). Your next message is about that answer as a whole.
Reply to one of your own messages. Your messages have the same Reply button, first in their row of actions. Hover over the message on a computer, or tap it on a phone, to show the row. This is useful when you want to return to a question you asked earlier and take it in a different direction.
Reply to selected text. Select a sentence, a figure, or a clause inside an answer. A small menu appears by the selection with Reply and Copy. Choose Reply and your follow-up is about those words only, not the whole answer. The selection has to sit inside one answer, and a very long selection is shortened to about 2,000 characters.
What You See Before You Send
After you choose Reply, the composer shows what you are replying to: "Replying to Scholarly" or "Replying to You", with the start of the message underneath. A selection is shown in quotation marks, so you can check you picked the right words.
Then type your message as usual. If you change your mind, press the X on the right, or press Esc on a keyboard. Your message goes back to being an ordinary one.
What You See After You Send
Your message appears in the chat with a short quote above it: who you replied to and up to two lines of the original.
Click the quote and the chat scrolls to the original message and highlights it for a couple of seconds. If that takes your reply off the screen, a Back to your reply button appears above the composer and returns you to where you were.
The quote also keeps a long chat readable later. When you come back to a thread next week, you can see which answer each follow-up was about without rereading everything in between.
Where It Helps
Reviewing a contract summary. Chat summarised a supplier agreement in eight points. Select the one sentence about termination notice and reply "where does the source say this?" The question is about that sentence, not the other seven.
Checking a figure. An answer lists five numbers from a quarterly report. Select one and reply "how was this calculated?" You do not have to retype the number or describe which row you mean.
Returning to an earlier thread of thought. Twenty messages ago you asked about onboarding for new managers, then the chat moved on to something else. Reply to that earlier question with "back to this: what would week two look like?"
Limits
- Earlier messages in the same chat. You can reply to your own messages and to finished answers in the chat you are in. An answer that is still being written cannot be replied to until it is done.
- One reply at a time. A message replies to one earlier message or one selection.
- A quote may not be clickable. If the original is not in the part of the chat that is loaded, or a later edit removed it from the current version of the chat, the quote stays as plain text and still shows what you replied to.
- If the original is gone when you send. The composer says so under the reply and keeps what you typed. Remove the reply to send the message without it, or reply to another message. A message that had files attached stays in the chat instead, with Retry to send it without the reply.
A reply is an ordinary chat message. It counts toward your chat allowance the same way any other message does. See Plans and Limits for what your plan includes.
How to Try It
- Open Scholarly and continue a chat that already has a few answers.
- Select a sentence in one of the answers and choose Reply.
- Check the quote in the composer, type your question, and send.
- Click the quote above your sent message to jump to the original, then use Back to your reply.
For everything else chat can do, see the AI Chat guide.
