Inside a call

Inside a call you talk, show things, and watch work land — all in the same room. The stage reflows around whatever matters most at that moment, so you rarely have to arrange anything yourself.

The stage

Everyone on the call sits on an orbit ring, and the call's one agent sits there too, in its own place. There's no sidekick avatar pinned to whoever started the call. A face that's unmuted carries a green mic badge and a live meter under it; a muted one goes grey and still.

Four controls run the room, always in the same order — mic, speaker, camera, and share. Each is a split control: the toggle turns it on or off, and the caret beside it picks the device or quality. Leave is the outlined red circle at the end of the call header. On a phone the four controls move to a bar along the bottom, and Leave moves down there with them.

The speaker toggle is the one worth knowing. It mutes the agent, and only in your ear — everyone else on the call stays audible to you, and they keep hearing the agent normally.

The room reshapes around how you're talking

There's no mode switch to find. The layout follows what you've muted.

Active and background agents

An agent on a call sits in one of two postures, and you can flip it between them at any point without interrupting the conversation.

Active reads the room instead of making you manage it. On your own with an agent it answers every turn, which is what you want when you're thinking out loud. Add other people and the same posture holds back on its own — it stays out while you and your teammates work something through, and speaks up when the conversation turns to it. You don't have to summon it formally: its name or a wake word always works, but simply talking to it is usually enough. When it can't tell whether a question was meant for it or for the person next to you, it stays quiet rather than talking over anyone. Nothing to switch when the group grows, and nothing to switch back when it shrinks.

Background is a hard mute. The agent keeps listening and keeps doing the work you hand it, but it won't say a word out loud — not even when you call it by name. Anything it has to tell you lands as text in the chat rail instead. Reach for it when you want an agent on the job without a voice in the room.

To change a posture, click the agent's tile — it toggles between the two.

There are two ways to quiet an agent, and they differ in who they apply to.

What the tile is telling you

Beyond the posture, a tile shows what its agent is doing right now.

The tile carries this without words — each state has its own motion, and speaking is simply the same ring moving faster. Listening is where it rests between turns, so a calm ring means it's there and waiting rather than idle. An agent that has dropped off the call shows no ring at all. There is deliberately no "thinking" state: you see it listening, then you see it working.

If a call loses its connection, the agent's state freezes where it was rather than flipping to something new. A ring that stops moving is the signal that the room dropped, not that the agent changed its mind.

Asking about your workspace

Not everything you say needs to become work. Ask about something that already exists in your workspace and your agent just answers, out loud, in the same breath — no thread, no hand-off, no waiting.

It can look across threads, agents, jobs, and miniapps this way. The dividing line is knowing versus doing: questions get answered on the call, and only genuinely new work gets dispatched to a specialist. When it does dispatch something you asked for, it says so — a quick "on it" — rather than going silent while you wonder whether it heard you.

Bringing someone else in

If you realise mid-call that you need someone, just say so — your agent can pull a teammate in by name without you leaving the room.

Your agent matches the name against your workspace directory, so a first name is usually enough. If two people could match, it asks which one you meant before inviting anyone. Because inviting reaches outside the room, your agent says out loud what it did rather than doing it silently.

The invite arrives as a notification that opens the live call when clicked — it doesn't ring anyone. Someone already on the call won't be pinged again. You can also invite from the call's own invite dialog if you'd rather pick people from a list.

Showing your agent something

Two ways to put something in front of your agent mid-call, each with a page of its own.

Either one takes the stage, compacting the people into a strip beside it. In both cases your agent looks when you ask rather than watching continuously, and answers in the same turn.

Screenshares, cameras, and pulled-up threads all share the same stage, so they don't cancel each other out. Whatever you're focused on fills it and the rest wait as thumbnails you can switch between.

Putting a thread on screen

It works the other way too. Ask your agent to pull up a thread and it puts that thread on the stage for everyone — no screen sharing, no hunting for a link.

The thread appears as a shared screen with a chip saying who's sharing it, showing the conversation and any files in it — stripped of the activity chrome so it reads cleanly from across a room. One thread at a time: pull up another and it takes the place of the first.

Say put that away to clear the stage, or use the X on the shared screen. Starting a screenshare or camera doesn't push the thread off — both sit on the stage together, and you pick which one has the floor.

The work board

When you and your agent agree on something to do, it dispatches the work to a specialist and a card appears under Work in the rail, with a count on the tab so you can see it land without looking away from the room.

Each card carries the same statuses you see elsewhere: live while it's working, unread once a result is waiting, then read. You can cancel, mark read, or archive without leaving the call. Until something is dispatched the tab isn't there at all, and an empty board reads "Ask for something and the dispatched threads land here."

Keeping an eye on something

Some things you want checked repeatedly rather than answered once. Ask your agent to watch for something and it sets up a watch — a recurring check that runs quietly in the background of the call and speaks up only when there's something to report.

You set watches by asking — there's no form to fill in. Your agent can watch a thread, a search across your workspace, your jobs, your shared screen, or your camera. You can run up to five at once, and at most two of those can be watching your screen or camera. One-off reminders — "nudge me in twenty minutes" — are counted separately, so setting a timer never costs you a watch.

Each one shows up under Watches in the rail's Recap, with what it's watching, how often it checks, when it last looked, and the latest thing it found. The card's controls let you pause, resume, or stop a watch without saying anything.

Chat and recap

The right rail carries the written half of the call.

When the conversation has already taken the middle of the stage — because you've muted both channels and are typing — the rail gives its column to the recap instead of repeating the transcript beside it.

On a narrow screen the rail steps out of the way and the header's Call / Recap tabs swap between the two.

Reload the page mid-call and the room fills itself back in — the conversation so far, whatever was on the stage, and your watches all come back rather than starting from blank.

Live captions

Speech turns into captions as people talk, attributed by name. Captions correct themselves in place — a line may re-attribute to the right speaker once there's enough audio to be sure, so don't be surprised to see one shift as it settles.

After the call

Hang up and the room doesn't disappear — it settles. You get the same layout at rest: the tiles go static, and the recap takes the floor where the people were.

The recap reads like a good meeting note — what you covered, what you decided, and the work that came out of it — about half a page for a short call and a page for a long one. Nebula resolves every speaker to their real name first, so it reads like minutes rather than a machine dump.

The rail carries the call's numbers — duration, messages, threads, and people — over two tabs.

Nebula also saves the transcript and recap as files on the call's thread, so they're reachable from the channel's Sessions section later. And Start again opens a fresh call seeded from the same thread, so a recurring conversation doesn't need setting up twice.

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