You can attach a PDF, and it will upload and be stored privately against your account. What the assistant does with it depends on the kind of file. It reads images directly. It cannot currently read the text inside a document you attach, so for a brief or a spreadsheet, paste the part you want it to work from into the message.
What the upload accepts
Each file can be up to 100MB, and an account can upload 60 files an hour. Anything larger or faster than that is refused with a message saying so.
These types go through: JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF, HEIC and HEIF; PDF; DOC and DOCX; XLS and XLSX; PPT and PPTX; ZIP and RAR; MP4, MOV, AVI and WebM; MP3, WAV and OGG; GLB and GLTF.
Two refusals surprise people:
- Plain text and Markdown files are not accepted. A .txt or .md upload is rejected. Paste the text into the message instead, which is what you want anyway.
- Executables and scripts are blocked outright, including .exe, .js, .py, .sql and .svg. The file's real contents are inspected, not its name, so renaming a blocked file to .pdf does not get it through.
Images are the thing it reads directly
Attach a drawing, a plan, a screenshot or a photograph and the assistant looks at the image itself. That is the path to use for anything visual. If you want a full design critique of work already on UNI, do not attach the sheets at all: ask it to critique the project and it will study the sheets already published there.
An attachment counts for one message only
Files and images are sent with the message you attach them to and are not carried into later turns. Referring back to "the PDF I sent" does not work even one message later. Attach it again with the question you want answered, and see how much of a conversation the assistant reads.
Your uploads are private
Files you attach are stored in a private location, not on a public web address. Links to them are signed and short lived, expiring after 30 minutes. Nobody can reach your upload by guessing a URL, and it is not attached to any project or profile of yours. It does stay stored against your account after the conversation ends, including if you delete the chat.