Conversations

The Conversations tab lists all conversations created inside the Pod. Every Pod member can see and contribute to them.

How to start a conversation in a Pod

As a human:

1. Open the Pod and click the Conversations tab
2. Type your message in the input bar and mention an agent with @
3. Press Enter — the conversation is created inside the Pod and visible to all members

As an agent:

Agents can create and post to conversations in a Pod directly — for example, to share a progress update, post a weekly summary, or surface findings from a background task. These conversations appear in the same list and are visible to all members. This is made possible by the Pods skill, which is automatically available to any agent invoked inside a Pod and can also be added to agents running outside of Pods. See the Overview for more details.

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Every conversation in a Pod is automatically indexed. Agents can search and reference past conversations as context, without you doing anything.

Mentioning people

Use @ to mention both agents and teammates in a conversation.

• Mentioning an agent — triggers the agent to respond in the conversation
• Mentioning a teammate — sends them a notification and draws their attention to the message

If you mention someone who is not yet a member of the Pod, Dust will prompt you to add them. See Members and roles for details on who can add members.

Triggering a conversation from an external source

It is possible to have an external event — a ticket, a webhook, a scheduled trigger, a Slack message — automatically create a conversation inside a specific Pod.

This is done by setting up a triggered agent that has the Pods skill enabled:

1. Create a triggered agent (e.g. from a Jira webhook, a Slack trigger, or the wake-up tool)
2. Add the Pods skill to the agent's configuration
3. In the agent's instructions, specify which Pod to post into — the agent can look it up by name using the Pods skill's list tool
4. When triggered, the agent creates a conversation in the target Pod with the relevant context

Common patterns:

• From a ticketing system — a new Jira ticket or Plain thread triggers an agent that opens a conversation in the Support Pod with the ticket details
• On a schedule — the wake-up tool triggers an agent each morning to post a daily brief into a Pod
• From a Slack message — a Slack trigger fires an agent that posts the message (or a summary of it) into the relevant Pod

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The Pods skill is automatically available to the global Dust agent and to any agent invoked inside a Pod. For agents running outside of Pods (such as triggered agents), the skill must be added explicitly in the agent's configuration.

Finding conversations

In multi-member Pods, a filter bar lets you narrow the list:

A search bar above the list lets you search conversation content across the whole Pod.

Joining an Open Pod

If you are not yet a member of an Open Pod, you will see a prompt at the bottom of the Conversations tab:

• Open Pod: "Join this Pod to participate in conversations." — click Join the [Pod name] Pod to join instantly
• Restricted Pod: "You need to be invited to participate in this Pod." — no join button; an Editor must invite you

Notification preferences

Each member can configure their notification preferences independently, per Pod.

How to configure notifications for a Pod:

1. Open the Pod
2. Click the ... button in the top-right header
3. Select your preferences:
   • New conversations — All or Never
   • New messages — All, Mentions only, or Never

Notification channels (in-app, Slack, email) are configured once globally in your profile settings.