Chat with Slackbot

Although Slack workspaces are primarily populated with real people, every Slack workspace includes a bot, a non-human automated interaction system, called Slackbot. With a presence icon in the shape of a heart , Slackbot is your plastic pal who’s fun to be with (to quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

When you join a workspace, Slackbot welcomes you and offers some introductory topics about which you can learn (Figure 96). It’s your concierge in conversations, too, talking to you privately when you paste in a link (such as to Google Drive) or use an app to certain external services for the first time, like the project-management system Asana: Slackbot asks about your preferences for how Asana works with Slack and stores your answers in your Slack account in that workspace.

Figure 96: Slackbot says hello and offers suggestions.
Figure 96: Slackbot says hello and offers suggestions.

Slackbot was designed to be fun and not annoying, but it’s also useful: Slack relies on Slackbot to send you alerts, and you can ask Slackbot to set reminders.

Watch for Alerts

When something happens in Slack that you should know about, you get a message from Slackbot, typically in the channel or conversation in which you’re already focused.

However, events can happen elsewhere, and Slackbot tracks those too. A notable case is when someone else @mentions you in a channel in which you are not a member. Slackbot asks them whether to invite you or send you a link (Figure 97). (In a private channel, Let Me Know doesn’t appear, because a link can’t be shared.) For any action but Do Nothing, you hear from Slackbot (Figure 98).

Figure 97: When I @mentioned Joe in a channel that he hadn’t joined, Slackbot asked ask me what to do.
Figure 97: When I @mentioned Joe in a channel that he hadn’t joined, Slackbot asked ask me what to do.
Figure 98: Adam mentioned me in a channel to which I didn’t belong, and choose to “let me know,” so I received a message with a link via Slackbot.
Figure 98: Adam mentioned me in a channel to which I didn’t belong, and choose to “let me know,” so I received a message with a link via Slackbot.

Make Reminders

You can make reminders yourself, for other workspace members, and for a channel. A reminder you set for yourself will appear as a direct message from Slackbot, subject to any notification choices you’ve made for direct messages in all your Slack apps, no matter in which Slack app you made the reminder. A reminder for another member will also appear to them as a direct message from Slackbot, but subject to the other member’s notification choices. A reminder for a channel appears in that channel as a regular message.

You can set up a general reminder, or you can ask Slack to remind you about a particular message:

  • General reminder: Type your reminder in the Message field with the syntax /remind who what when. For example, /remind me to stand up in 10 minutes. You don’t have to put quotation marks around the “what” part to separate it from “when”; Slackbot parses that automatically.

    You can also use the Slackbot DM conversation to issue reminders without typing a slash, as in remind me of a call tomorrow at 2pm (Figure 99).

    Figure 99: Slackbot is digital gingko biloba, but also quite literal. Unlike Siri or Google Assistant it reminds me “of a call,” instead of filling in just “call.”
    Figure 99: Slackbot is digital gingko biloba, but also quite literal. Unlike Siri or Google Assistant it reminds me “of a call,” instead of filling in just “call.”

    For reminders you create, you can remind yourself, other people, or entire channels. So you can say something like:

    /remind @adam article discussion on Tuesday at 3 pm or /remind #articles discuss latest issue tomorrow.

    Notice the syntax here: to remind a person you type an @ with their handle, but to remind a channel you use a #.

    Reminders can recur automatically: use a pluralized day (Wednesdays) or every in association with something else (every two weeks).

  • Message reminder: To remind yourself about a specific message (only in desktop and web apps), click the “More actions” button when you hover over the message in question, choose “Remind me about this,” then choose an interval (Figure 100).

Figure 100: You can choose to get reminders about individual messages.
Figure 100: You can choose to get reminders about individual messages.

To review a list of extant reminders that you’ve set for yourself and that other people have set for channels or conversations in which you’re a participant, either click View Reminders after adding one (Figure 99, above), or issue the command /remind list. The list has active links that let you mark reminders as complete, delete them, or snooze them if they’re overdue. Click Dismiss, and the list disappears from the message list, too!

Slackbot reminds you at the appropriate interval, and you can snooze it or tell it that you’ve taken care of it, in which case it updates the notice visually by showing it crossed out.

Mind That Sass, Bot!

Did I mention that Slackbot is sassy? Not necessarily by default, but you can up the sass quotient (or reduce it) if you like. Assuming your workspace’s admin hasn’t turned the feature off, in Slack’s preferences on the web (enter in your browser’s address field workspace-name.slack.com/customize/slackbot), you can set trigger words or phrases (Figure 101).

Figure 101: I wouldn’t say I’m missing work.
Figure 101: I wouldn’t say I’m missing work.

Each trigger word or phrase can have more than one response associated with it, and Slack selects randomly from multiple responses. Having different responses can make Slack seem more amusing and less relentless.

You can include both text and images in a response, using a URL to specify a path to an image; it’s expanded when Slackbot responds with that message. You can also use emoji in the standard :emoji-name: format. These responses are public, and are formatted like messages from other users.

I’ll be honest: This feature can get old fast if you pick any common word. While Slackbot chooses among all available responses, it always replies when a keyword is used, and thus any frequently used word causes Slackbot to natter on all the time.

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