---
audience: everyone
summary: ScaiWave is a multi-tenant messaging and collaboration platform with first-class
  AI participants, structured notes, and an open protocol.
title: Overview
path: overview
status: published
---

# Overview

ScaiWave is a messaging and collaboration platform built around three
ideas that most chat tools treat as afterthoughts:

1. **AI is a first-class participant**, not a sidebar widget. AI helpers
   join rooms the same way people do, follow the same conversation, and
   can be reasoned about as members.
2. **Notes and conversations live in the same place**, with hard
   distinctions about what each is for. Conversations are ephemeral
   threads; notes are durable documents. Both are addressable, linkable,
   and searchable.
3. **Multi-tenant by design**. Every workspace, every room, every
   message is scoped to a tenant. Federation lets tenants talk to each
   other across organisational boundaries without giving up that
   isolation.

## What you can do with it

- **Talk to your team in rooms** — direct messages, group rooms, public
  rooms, and AI-only chat rooms. With emoji, reactions, threading,
  redaction, edits, mentions, and live typing.
- **Bring AI into the conversation**. Engage an AI assistant the same
  way you'd `@` a teammate. Each AI participant has its own model,
  system prompt, response mode, plugin loadout, and behaviour caps.
- **Delegate long work to sidekicks**. When something will take more
  than thirty seconds, the AI can fan out work to background "sidekick"
  rooms that run in parallel and report back when done.
- **Plan multi-step tasks**. The AI can commit to a written plan, work
  through it step by step, revise it mid-flight, and recover from
  failures. You can pause, resume, or cancel it as the supervisor.
- **Keep durable notes** alongside the rooms they came from. Notes
  support wiki-style `[[links]]`, embedded math, todo blocks that index
  into a cross-workspace todo system, voice transcription, and AI
  organisation.
- **Take audio and video calls** in any room, with screen share, PiP,
  recordings, and live transcription.
- **Federate across tenants**. Invite a participant from another
  organisation into your room; they show up as a real member, their
  messages stream in, and their actions are authenticated end-to-end.
- **Bridge to other chat platforms**. Slack, Discord, Teams, or a remote
  ScaiWave — a single signed webhook protocol relays messages both ways.

## Who it's for

- **Teams** who want a unified surface for chat, notes, and AI
  assistance without juggling four tools.
- **Builders** integrating AI into their work — ScaiWave gives the AI
  real conversational context, persistent memory, and the ability to
  use tools without leaving the chat.
- **Tenants needing strict isolation** — every model, room, and
  document is scoped to a tenant, and you can federate without
  surrendering control.

## What ScaiWave is *not*

- **Not a single-user notebook app**. Notes are powerful, but the
  product centre of gravity is multi-participant rooms.
- **Not a video-only platform**. Calls are first-class, but they
  belong inside rooms; there's no top-level "meetings" surface.
- **Not a closed system**. ScaiWave speaks an open Server-to-Server
  protocol; you can host your own instance and federate with the
  ScaiLabs-hosted one.

## How the pieces fit together

| Surface | Layer | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Client (web / desktop / mobile) | SolidJS + Tauri 2.x | Renders rooms, notes, calls; subscribes to a live WebSocket stream. |
| API | FastAPI + Python 3.12+ | Routes user actions; emits events; coordinates AI inference. |
| AI bridge | Python | Streams to and from ScaiGrid (model inference); manages plugins, tools, and sidekicks. |
| Notes engine | SQLAlchemy + Yjs CRDT | Persists notes; supports live multi-cursor co-editing. |
| Search | Weaviate | Hybrid BM25 + vector retrieval over messages and notes. |
| Calls | LiveKit SFU | Audio, video, screen share, recording, transcription. |
| Identity | ScaiKey | OIDC sign-in, group sync, federation key distribution. |
| Storage | MinIO / S3 | Media uploads, audio recordings, exported room bundles. |
| Realtime fan-out | NATS JetStream | Server-to-server event distribution. |

You don't need to know any of that to use the product. You do need to
know about **rooms** and **workspaces** — see
[Concepts](/docs/scaiwave/concepts) next.

## What's next

- **First time?** Start with the [Quickstart](/docs/scaiwave/quickstart).
- **Want the mental model?** Read
  [Rooms and workspaces](/docs/scaiwave/concepts/rooms-and-workspaces).
- **Building an integration?** Jump to
  [Developer tutorials](/docs/scaiwave/tutorials/developer).
- **Operating a tenant?** Bookmark
  [Configuration](/docs/scaiwave/reference/configuration) and
  [CLI](/docs/scaiwave/reference/cli).