Catch up on a Slack channel

You were away for a few days and a Slack channel kept going without you. Scrolling back through two hundred messages to find the three that matter is the job nobody wants. In this recipe the agent reads the channel for you and tells you what was decided, what is waiting on you, and where each of those was said.

What you need

• XataWorks, open, with the agent answering. If it is not yet, Getting started covers the one decision to make first.
• A Slack account in the workspace you want to catch up on.

1. Open Slack beside the chat

Slack is one of the sites XataWorks already understands. Ask the agent to open app.slack.com in the chat’s browser panel and sign in there as you normally would. XataWorks never signs in for you.

The page-tools control in the browser toolbar then lists what the agent can do in your workspace, among them Read a Slack channel’s history, Read a Slack thread’s replies and Search Slack messages.

2. Ask for the catch-up

Name the channel and the stretch of time, and say what you want out of it:

Read #launch since Monday morning. Tell me what was decided, which questions are waiting on me, and anything with a deadline. Give me a link to the message for each one.

The agent reads the channel’s messages, opens the threads that matter, and fetches a link to each message it cites. The first time it uses each action, XataWorks asks you, naming the action and what it is about to be called with. These actions only read, so an answer that allows the site’s read-only actions covers the rest of the catch-up without allowing anything that changes your workspace.

3. Ask the follow-up questions

The chat remembers the catch-up, so ask what you would have asked a colleague: “What did Priya say about the launch date?”, “Has anyone answered the question about the budget?”. For something said outside this channel, ask the agent to search: it uses Slack’s own search, with its operators, such as from: and in:.

4. Keep it, if it is worth keeping

Ask the agent to write the catch-up into a new document. It opens beside the chat, where you can edit it, print it or save a Word copy.

Where this recipe stops

• Reading only. Slack’s actions also include sending a message, replying in a thread and adding a reaction. This recipe uses none of them, and allowing the read-only actions does not allow them: if you ask for one, XataWorks asks you first.
• A busy channel is read in pieces. The agent reads up to two hundred messages at a time and pages back from there. Over a long stretch, a narrower question — one topic, or a shorter period — gives a better answer, and an answer about the whole channel may be built from a trimmed result. Page tools explains why.
• The workspace has to be open in this chat. The agent reaches Slack only through a tab in its own chat’s browser panel, signed in as you, and it sees only what you can see.

Read more

• Page tools — what a site’s actions are, and how to see them.
• Approvals and permissions — the three classes of action, and how far each answer reaches.
• Documents — the word processor the catch-up can go into.