Ask Orbit

Ask Orbit answers questions from the pages you can access and cites the pages it used. It does not answer from general knowledge: if nothing in your workspace matches, it says so.

Open Ask Orbit

• Choose Ask Orbit in the sidebar, or press Cmd/Ctrl+K, for the full-page view.
• On a page, choose Ask about this page to open Ask as a panel beside the page with that page attached. Open as full chat expands the panel into the full-page view.
• On a phone, Ask Orbit in the bottom bar opens it as a sheet — see Use Orbit on your phone.

Ask Orbit appears only after your organization admin has turned it on (Manage your organization) and only in workspaces the admin has included.

Ask a question

Type in the composer — Ask anything — @ to attach a page, / for commands — and press Send.

• @ attaches a page so the answer draws on it directly, from This workspace or Other workspaces. Attached pages appear as chips you can remove.
• / opens commands, including Switch workspace.
• The scope menu chooses which workspace to search, or All workspaces. Switching workspace starts a new chat.
• Stop interrupts an answer that is still streaming.

Ask a follow-up in the same chat to keep the context.

Read the answer

While Ask works it shows what it is doing — Searching your workspace…, Reading 3 pages… — and the finished answer keeps an activity log of each step, such as Searched pages or Read page section, so you can see where it looked.

Numbered citations in the answer point to the passages Ask used, and Sources lists the pages underneath; select a source to open the page. Copy answer copies the text.

Every answer carries the reminder “AI-generated — verify against the cited pages.” If Ask finds no supporting pages it replies that nothing in the workspace matches, and if a finished answer cannot be verified against your pages, Ask withdraws it.

Chats

History lists your chats under Today, Yesterday, Past week, Past 30 days, and Older. Open a chat to continue it, or choose New chat. A chat’s actions menu offers Pin, Rename, Archive, and Delete chat.

Chats are saved in an Orbit Chat History folder in your own OneDrive and follow your account across devices — see Ask chat history.

Rate an answer

Use Good response or Bad response under a finished answer. The dialog lets you name the problem — Not factually correct, Missed relevant pages, Misunderstood the question, or Incomplete response — and add details. Your rating and comments are shared with the Orbit team to improve Ask Orbit; your pages and chats stay private.

When Ask Orbit is unavailable

• Ask Orbit isn’t turned on for your organization yet. Ask your admin. — an organization admin turns it on under Organization → Ask Orbit - AI.
• Ask Orbit is turned off for this workspace. — the admin excluded this workspace.
• You’ve reached today’s Ask Orbit limit. It resets tomorrow. — each person has a daily allowance of AI actions, shared between Ask Orbit and AI editing.

Note

Ask Orbit only reads pages you can already open. Your question and the page passages Ask retrieves are sent to the configured AI provider — Orbit’s hosted Azure OpenAI service by default, or your organization’s own Azure OpenAI resource when an admin has configured one. See Data residency.

Up next: Ask chat history — where chats are stored and how they follow you between devices.