Contextual Images is a feature in Glean Assistant that surfaces diagrams, charts, screenshots, and other images found in your company’s indexed documents directly in chat responses. These visuals appear inline with supporting answers, helping you quickly understand technical concepts or visualize referenced content without leaving your workflow.

Key benefits

  • Instant Visual Context: See diagrams, process maps, and screenshots exactly when you need them.
  • Improved Collaboration: Reduce back-and-forth over missing visuals during technical troubleshooting or brainstorming.
  • Time Savings: No need to open multiple files or search folders for referenced images.

Example use cases

  • Requesting a system architecture diagram for a product or service.
  • Viewing a whiteboard photo from a design review captured in a meeting notes doc.
  • Troubleshooting a support issue with step-by-step screenshots extracted from internal documentation.

How it works

1

Scan Data Sources

Glean Assistant scans your connected data sources (Google Drive, SharePoint, and OneDrive) for images that match your query context.
2

Display Relevant Images

When an image is relevant and you have viewing permissions, it appears automatically in your Assistant response.
3

Support Multiple Formats

Images are supported if they are standalone files (PNG, JPG, GIF, etc.) or embedded inside Google Docs, PDFs, Word, and PowerPoint documents (except Google Drawings).

Permissions & privacy

  • You will only see images if you have access to the underlying source document.
  • The feature honors your company’s sharing and security policies automatically.
This feature may not be available for your deployment. Please contact your admin if you do not see images rendered.

Frequently asked questions

Contextual Images surfaces existing images from indexed sources; user uploads via chat are not currently supported for rendering.
Standard image formats (PNG, JPG, GIF, etc.) from Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, and those embedded in PDFs, DOCX, and PPTX files are supported (excluding Google Drawings).
Just ask a question; for best results, reference the concept or process you want to visualize (e.g., “Show me the pipeline diagram for project Mercury”).

Further reading

For further details, troubleshooting tips, and admin cost controls, visit: