Key ideas
The handful of words Asteria Cloud uses everywhere, defined plainly and once.
Most of the confusion people have with Asteria Cloud in week one comes down to eight words. Here they are. You do not need to memorise them: skim now, come back when one of them shows up and does not make sense.
Asteria
The assistant you talk to. When you type in the big box and something answers, that is Asteria.
Worth knowing early: Asteria is a doer, not an oracle. It can go off and read forty documents, run calculations, build a spreadsheet, and search the web. Asking it a question it can answer from memory is the least interesting thing it does.
Conversation
One continuous thread of back and forth, like an email chain. Everything in a conversation is shared context: files you attached, answers already given, decisions already made. Within a conversation, Asteria has all of it in full.
Across conversations, it has the gist and not the detail. A new chat does not inherit Tuesday's files or Tuesday's exact numbers, but Asteria can pull in a summary of relevant past conversations, automatically on your first message or when you ask it to look. So Wednesday's chat may well remember that you were working on the Q3 budget, without remembering the figures in it.
The practical version: if the detail matters, stay in the same conversation or restate it. See Searching your conversations.
Conversations are saved automatically and listed down the left. See The sidebar.
Workspace
A folder for conversations that belong to the same project, and (unlike a plain folder) the conversations inside it can share context with each other.
Use one when a project generates a dozen chats over a month and you are tired of scrolling. See Workspaces.
Collection
A named pile of documents that Asteria can search. You put files in once, and from then on you can ask questions of the whole pile in any conversation.
This is the single biggest difference between "an AI chatbot" and something useful at work. A conversation holds a handful of files. A collection holds hundreds and stays there.
The one thing to remember: Asteria cannot guess which collection you mean. Say its name in your message ("check the Supplier Contracts collection"). See Asking a collection questions.
Workshop
Where things Asteria builds for you actually live: documents, decks, spreadsheets, diagrams. It opens as a panel beside your conversation.
The point of the Workshop is that a deliverable is not a wall of text in a chat. It is a real file you can edit, revise, roll back and download. See The Workshop.
Agent
A saved version of Asteria set up for one job, with its own instructions, its own collections and its own tools.
Think of it as briefing a new colleague once instead of repeating yourself every morning. "You are our brand voice checker. Here is the style guide. Here is the tone we use. Flag anything that drifts." Then you (and anyone you share it with) just talk to that agent. See Agents.
Skill
A reusable instruction sheet for one repeated task, which you can drop into any conversation by typing / and picking it.
An agent is who you are talking to. A skill is how to do one particular thing. Same skill, many agents. See Skills.
Workflow
A job that runs on its own, on a schedule or when something happens, with nobody watching.
"Every Monday at 8, read last week's support tickets and post the top five themes." That is a workflow. See Workflows.
And one more: the model
Underneath everything is an AI model doing the language work, and your organisation may offer several. There is a picker in the message box.
You can ignore it. Your administrator has set a sensible default and it is the right choice for almost everything. The reason to change it is covered in The message box, and it is a shorter list of reasons than you would expect.
How they fit together
A quick sanity check, in one sentence: you have a conversation with Asteria (or with an agent you built), it searches your collections, you can invoke a skill to steer one step, the result lands in the Workshop, and if you want the whole thing to happen again next week without you, you turn it into a workflow.