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The nao chat combines context-aware analytics with transparent execution.

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Key Features

Natural Language Queries

Ask questions in plain English and get actionable answers.

Data Visualization

Automatically generate charts and visual explanations from query results.

Transparent Reasoning

Inspect the SQL and logic behind each answer.

Conversation History

Continue previous analyses with full chat history.

Speak to Prompt

Dictate a question with your microphone and send the transcribed prompt.

Memory

Preserve user-level preferences across conversations.

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How It Works

When you ask a question, the agent follows this flow:
1

Context Discovery

The agent searches and reads your context files to understand your data model, definitions, and rules.
2

Query Generation

It composes SQL based on the available context and your question.
3

Execution

The query runs against connected data sources and returns results.
4

Visualization

If useful, the agent renders charts from the result set.
5

Response

The agent summarizes findings in plain language with supporting evidence.

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Speak To Prompt

From the chat input:
  1. Click the microphone icon.
  2. Grant microphone access when prompted.
  3. Speak your request.
  4. Review or edit the transcription, then send it.
Only transcribed text is stored in chat history.
Speak to Prompt requires an admin-configured OpenAI API key, and is currently supported with OpenAI models.

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Context Management

The agent grounds answers in project context, including:
  • Context files and business definitions synced into your project.
  • Rules and instructions that shape generation behavior.
  • Data source metadata and available schema information.
For details on configuring context, see Context Builder.

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Visualizations and Image Input

The chat UI can render charts directly from agent query results. Supported chart types include:
  • Bar charts
  • Line charts
  • Pie charts
  • Area charts
  • Stacked area charts
  • Scatter charts
  • Radar charts
For large numeric values, nao formats chart Y-axis labels into shorter values such as 100K, 1.5M, or 2B to keep charts readable.

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Image input

You can attach images directly in the chat input when you want the agent to inspect a screenshot, dashboard, chart, or UI state. The agent treats images as part of the conversation - it can describe them, transcribe text out of them, compare them to data, or use them to disambiguate a question (“the spike in this chart”). How to attach an image There are three ways to add images to a message:
  • Click the + menu in the chat input and pick Upload image.
  • Drag an image file from your desktop into the chat input - the input shows a highlighted drop zone while you drag.
  • Paste an image directly from your clipboard (e.g. after cmd+shift+4 on macOS or a snipping tool on Windows). The paste handler is scoped to the chat input so pasting elsewhere on the page still works normally.
Selected images appear as thumbnails above the input. Click the small X on any thumbnail to remove it before sending. Supported formats and limits
  • Formats: image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/webp.
  • Up to 4 images per message.
  • Up to 5 MB per image.
Files outside these formats or above the size cap are rejected client-side before upload. Viewing images in the conversation Images you’ve sent stay attached to the message and re-display when the chat is reloaded or shared. Click any image in the conversation to open it in a full-size lightbox - close it with Esc, the X button, or by clicking outside. Images are stored against your project and served from a stable URL, so they keep rendering inside the chat history and any story or shared link the conversation feeds into.

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Managing Your Chat History

Your chat list lives in the left sidebar. To keep it tidy, nao gives you two ways to remove conversations:
  • Star the chats you want to keep so they’re always preserved
  • Open Settings -> General -> Danger Zone and click Delete all non-starred chats to bulk-clear everything you haven’t starred
The action is destructive but recoverable internally: chats are soft-deleted (hidden from your sidebar, search, and history), not erased. Starred chats are never affected.

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Query Guardrails

For BigQuery connections, nao can enforce a maximum query size in GB before the agent runs SQL. When configured, nao performs a dry run first:
  • Queries under the limit execute normally
  • Queries over the limit are blocked before BigQuery scans the data