Chat & Advisers

This guide covers the chat interface, how Varen routes your questions to specialist advisers, and practical techniques for getting better responses.

The chat interface

The Chat tab inside a workspace window is where conversations happen. Type into the input box at the bottom of the window. Press Enter to send your message; Shift+Enter inserts a newline without sending, which is useful for longer, structured messages.

Responses stream in token-by-token as they're generated. You don't wait for a complete response — you see it build. This lets you start reading and understanding the direction of the answer before it's finished. While a response is streaming, a Stop button appears on that turn. Click it to abort the response early if it's heading in the wrong direction, then edit your question and try a different framing.

How Varen chooses an adviser

You never choose an adviser manually under normal operation. When you send a question, Varen reads it, classifies the subject matter, and routes it to the most appropriate adviser — or combination of advisers — best suited to answer. A question about capital gains tax goes to the financial adviser. A question about a sore knee goes to the health adviser. A question about whether you can claim home-office expenses as a nurse working from a dedicated room goes to both.

This routing is automatic and invisible. You just ask. The routing logic takes into account the workspace's established intent, your profile facts, the question itself, and the context from earlier in the session. A well-named workspace with a clear purpose produces more accurate routing than a vague one.

Pinning an adviser

The adviser selector on the left of the chat toolbar lets you pin a specific adviser for the session. The default is Daily — a general-purpose mode that routes freely between all 14 domains based on the question. When you pin a specific adviser, every response in that session is framed from that adviser's perspective, regardless of the question's content.

Pinning is most useful when a workspace is entirely focused on one domain and you want every response framed consistently from that perspective — a workspace dedicated entirely to legal research, for example, where you always want the legal adviser's framing even for questions that might otherwise route elsewhere.

The Understanding panel

Above each response is an Understanding bar. Expand it to see what the system considered when preparing the reply: facts it drew from your knowledge base, any web pages it consulted during research, how it interpreted your question, and other signals it used to form the response. Think of it as "showing the working".

The Understanding panel is most useful when a response surprises you or seems off. If the answer doesn't fit your situation, the Understanding panel often shows why — perhaps a fact in your knowledge base is outdated, or the question was interpreted in a way you didn't intend, or a web source contributed content that skewed the answer. When you understand what went wrong, you can either edit the question to be more precise or update the relevant fact in the knowledge base.

Intent divergence

If a question seems to come from a domain well outside this workspace's established purpose, Varen pauses and shows an Intent divergence panel instead of answering immediately. This panel offers three choices:

Continue — override the check and answer the question anyway within this session.
New Session — start a fresh session in this workspace, which is useful if you're beginning a new sub-topic that you want to keep separate from the existing thread.
Cancel — dismiss the panel and rewrite the question in a way that fits the workspace's purpose.

Intent divergence is not an error and it's not a refusal. It's a signal that the question might be better served by a different workspace, or that a clean context would produce a better answer. If you consistently find it triggering on questions that are genuinely within scope, check the derived intent in the Profile tab — it may need updating to reflect how the workspace has evolved since it was created.

Getting better responses

The quality of Varen's responses depends substantially on the quality of the questions. A few principles make a consistent difference:

Be specific. "What are my home-office deduction options as a sole trader in Queensland with a dedicated room?" gets a better answer than "can I claim home-office deductions?" The more context is in the question, the less the adviser has to assume.
Edit rather than retry. If a response misses the mark, use the pencil icon to edit your question and add the missing context or reframe the ask. The branching model means the original response is preserved — you can always come back to it — so there's no cost to trying a different angle.
Use your profile. Anything stable about who you are belongs in your profile so you never have to repeat it in every conversation. See Knowledge & Profile for how to set this up.
Use uploads. If you're asking about a specific document — a lease, a contract, a financial statement, a medical report — upload it and refer to it by name. The adviser can read the document's content and give answers specific to your actual situation rather than a general one.
One question at a time. Multi-part questions work, but can produce multi-part answers where some parts are weaker than others. Separating distinct questions into separate turns — or separate sessions — generally produces clearer, more thorough responses to each part.