There two main ways to interact with the scene, through dialogue and through scene actions.
## Your turn!
Whenever the input element at the bottom of the screen is available, it means it is your turn to do something.
By default the main player character will be selected, but you can act as any active character or even the narrator. [See the section on acting as another character](#acting-as-another-character).
Write a message and hit `enter` to send it to the scene.
### Separate actions and dialogue
When writing out your character's actions, spoken words should go into `"` and actions should be written in `*`. Talemate will automatically supply the other if you supply one.
That means if you enter `Elmer enters the room. "Hello everyone!"`, Talemate will automatically convert it to `*Elmer enters the room.* "Hello everyone!"`.
Likewise if you enter `*Elmer enters the room.* Hello everyone!`, Talemate will automatically convert it to `*Elmer enters the room.* "Hello everyone!"` as well.
If no markers are provided, Talemate will assume the text is spoken.
### Linebreaks are ok!
You can use linebreaks in your messages, to do so press `shift+enter` to create a new line.
### Acting as another character
Version `0.26` introduces a new `act-as` feature, which allows you to act as another character in the scene. This can be done by hitting the `tab` key while the input is focused. It will cycle through all active characters and finally the narrator before returning to the main player character.
If you start a message with the `@` character you can have the AI generate the response based on what action you are taking. This is useful if you want to quickly generate a response without having to type out the full action and narration yourself.
A set of tools to help you interact with the scenario. Find out more about the various actions in the [Scene Tools](/talemate/user-guide/scenario-tools) section of the user guide.
Sometimes Talemate will be generating a response (or go through a chain of generations) and you want to cancel it. You can do this by hitting the **:material-stop-circle-outline:** button that will appear in the scene tools bar.
While the generation is cancelled immediately, the current inference request will still be processed by the LLM backend. The Talemate UI will be responsive but the LLM api may require some time to finish the request.
